





















\cf.^..,%^ 



^^ ^ ^3;::;*.^^,^ 










^0^ 



- ^ 






^^ ^ 



^, 



V ^^"*«^,% 




- .d 






^ ^iS^ ^^ f^^^^^: ^^ r^^S^ 












^^.-..^^ 






: ' -\iM/)% 






:v"S'-/ 



<^^ 



















- t^m^ 






^ 



WVv//.^, 






"<^^ 



0- .^ 



^^ 



m.1 Xp\ 




%'"^^o^. 



^,\ -^ao^ .^^IP'/^ ^^o^ 



*• ^ 



.^°'-- 



»'%;; 



v^^^ 



%„ 






A ^^ 



s^' ^^ 









m-^ ^ 



«-> ^ 









^K ,^^-w-^^^ ^^<}.^ ^^ -,, 



\y 



,*^ 









V ^' ""/■, -% 









-;-^/ ^^'^^^/ ^,''^^v^ ^<:'«-> 
>°^:;*;>fV cP^.:-;:/'\. oo\^-;.v .< 















^^^^. 






^ #^ ^ ./■> T"^^" ^c 



:^^ 










"t. 



^ ^ 



*^ °^ 



V 



1^^ 






"'. "%• 






:.S >^ 






0^ : f" 






'•-^ 



r 









«.>o^ 



- t.- 



if' ^' 



H cu - ■SN:: H - ^i> q^ 






.^^ 






\ ^<^ ;^;s,\: ^'^^ 



•X 



■v'^C^.^^N 



ai 



'^-.^^ 



.^ 






NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 



NEW DEMANDS IN 
EDUCATION 



BY 
JAMES PHINNEY MUNROE 

President (jqio-ii). National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education; 
Chairman^ Massachusetts Commission for the Blind; Chairman, Com- 
mittee on Education, Boston Chamber of Commerce; Secretary of the 
Corporation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Author, 
" The Educational Ideal"; Editor, Walker's 
*' Discussions in Education.'* 




Garden City New York 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1912 



J\*^1 



Att RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OP TRANSLATION 
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 



COFYEIGHT, ZgX2, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COUPANY 



COUNTRY LITE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 



gaA319365 



PREFACE 

THE fundamental demand in education, as 
in everything else, is for efficiency — • 
physical efficiency, mental efficiency, moral 
efficiency. 

The boys and girls in school are the greatest of 
all national resources, infinitely more important than 
those natural resources of which so much is heard; 
and the province of education is to conserve these 
most valuable of assets. 

The potential economic worth of each school 
pupil, to say nothing of his moral value as a house- 
holder and as a citizen, is enormous, provided he 
be so educated, by his family, by his environment, 
and by his schools, as to become an efficient member 
of society. And to be an efficient member of 
society the pupil must have a sound body, trained 
senses, a clear mind, and, above all, a well-balanced 
character. 

Therefore the supreme aim of education, acting 
through homes, schools, and the community in gen- 
eral, should be to foster sound and capable bodies, 



i\ 



vi PREFACE 

to develop well-trained minds, and to build up 
strong, self-reliant characters. 

How is education going to do this? By putting 
fifty or sixty children into uncomfortable desks in an 
ill-ventilated schoolroom and then bombarding them 
with facts? Far from it. To make those fifty or 
sixty children really efiicient we must treat each one 
of them as an individual problem, ascertaining his 
vulnerable points physically, and remedying them; 
finding out what kind of a mind he has and develop- 
ing it; getting at his strong and weak points morally 
and building out of them a sound and well-rounded 
personality. 

The first of the new demands in education, there- 
fore, Is for small classes, so that the teacher may 
really know each one of her pupils and may give 
him a true education suited to his special needs. 

The second of the new demands is that we shall 
take much greater account than we now do of the 
health of the child, by seeing that his eyes, ears, 
lungs, and all the other parts of his physical 
machinery are sound, or are made sound, and that 
he has extensive playground, an abundance of fresh 
air, and plenty of the right sort of games and plays. 

The third of the new demands is that we shall pro- ' 
vide genuine, educative exercise for the mind of the 
child by giving it interesting and stimulating work 



PREFACE vii 

to do, and that we shall not clog and deaden it with 
unrelated, uninteresting, and unimportant facts. 

The fourth of the new demands is that we shall 
really train all the senses of the pupil so that he is 
actually able to use his eyes for seeing, his ears for 
hearing, and his hands for making things that are 
a credit to the maker. Too many pupils in the 
schools seem to have no connection between their 
eyes, their ears, their hands, and their brains; so 
that, as far as efficiency goes, they might just as 
well be blind, deaf, and crippled. 

The fifth of the new demands is that education 
shall put its chief emphasis upon character: that the 
pupil shall be trained, in school and out of school, 
to-day and to-morrow and all the time, toward self- 
reliance, self-control, self-respect, and self-denial. 

The sixth demand is that the main emphasis of 
schooling shall be placed on the social side, on pre- 
paring the boy and girl, that is, for effective living 
as a member of the community of which he finds 
himself a constituent part. 

The seventh demand is that when the pupil gets 
to be fourteen years old, to that age when, if he so 
choose, he may leave school, there shall be some one 
right at his elbow, some one who knows and whom 
the boy respects, to advise him what to do next. 

And lastly it is demanded that from that four- 



viii PREFACE 

teenth year up to manhood and womanhood each 
and every pupil shall have a wide variety of oppor- 
tunity for making himself (or herself) into the most 
intelligent, the most efficient, and therefore the 
happiest, citizen that it is possible for him to be. 

Upon these theses the arguments of all the follow- 
ing chapters rest. Where there is repetition, it is 
for the sake of presenting the theme in some new 
light; where there is criticism, it is of what is not 
bad, but outworn; where there is exhortation, it is 
that we may rouse ourselves to the needless waste 
and loss of that greatest of human resources, that 
possession out of which civilization has come and 
for the development of which civilization exists — 
the moral energy latent and easy to be stimulated 
in every boy and girl. 

Acknowledgment is due to the Educational Review, 
the WorWs Work, the Popular Science Monthly and 
the Technology Review for permission to use, in some 
of the chapters, material which has already ap- 
peared in those magazines. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Grievance of the Average Boy Against the 

Average School 3 

II. The Common School ', . 26 

III. Education as Prevention 42 

IV. The Demand for Efficient Administration . . 57 
V. The Demand for a True Profession of Teaching 70 

VI. The Demand for Vocational Training ... 85 

VII. The Pressing Need for Industrial Education . 109 

VIII. The Demands of Business 125 

IX. The Need for Real Patriotism 140 

X. The Demand for Trained Citizens . . . . 156 

XI. The Demand for Discipline 172 

XII. The Demand for a Citizen's High School . .186 

XIII. How the Colleges Ruin the High Schools . . 202 

XIV. The Donning of Long Trousers . . . . . 214 
XV. The Mechanic Arts 237 

XVI. The Educational Bearings of Manual Training 245 

XVII. The Russian System of Manual Training . . 264 



CONTENTS 

XVIII. The Demand for Breadth 271 

XIX. What Is Demanded of the Young Engineer . 281 

XX. The Genesis of These New Demands . . 290 



NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 



CHAPTER I 

THE GRIEVANCE OF THE AVERAGE BOY AGAINST THE 
AVERAGE SCHOOL 

I HAVE seen recently a high school in a large 
industrial city — a city absolutely dependent 
upon the quality of its manufactures — in 
which the course of study, the teaching, and the 
whole atmosphere are determined, not by the real 
requirements of its five hundred pupils, not by the 
paramount need of that city for industrially 
trained young men, but almost solely by the special 
demands of about ten pupils who are going some day 
to be examined for entrance to some college or uni- 
versity. Moreover, I have seen those ten pupils 
studying, and studying hard, not for the sake of 
education, but simply that they may pass wholly 
artificial sets of questions in an entirely arbitrary 
list of topics established by men who know little of 
the mental needs of youth and absolutely nothing 
of the genuine educational demands of that indus- 
trial city. Yet, should this high school fail to get 
that tiny minority into college, its teachers would 

3 



4 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

be condemned by the whole body of their fellow- 
citizens. 

Meanwhile the manufacturers of that city are 
spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to give 
the youth in their employ, directly or indirectly, 
the fundamental training in accuracy, initiative, re- 
sourcefulness, "handiness," sense of responsibility, 
self-reliance, and "gumption" in which they should 
have been thoroughly grounded in the public schools. 
More than this, not only are the families of those 
youth denying themselves many comforts, if not 
necessities, of life which might have been theirs, 
through higher wages, had the boys been genuinely 
educated before going to work, but the scale of liv- 
ing for the whole community is being proportionately 
reduced. And, most serious of all, the economic 
future of that city is actually threatened because its 
workmen are mentally and manually untrained. 
Yet for this colossal failure the school receives little 
or no blame. Custom expects a high school to meet 
the unreal demands of the college, but does not ex- 
pect it to prepare for the real and pressing require- 
ments of daily life. 

With these anc«nalous facts in mind, let us con- 
sider the case of the average schoolboy, a type repre- 
senting two thirds or three fourths of the seventeen 
or eighteen millions enrolled in the public schools. 



THE AVERAGE BOY 5 

This boy is born into a family which absolutely de- 
pends upon wages received by one or more of its 
members as workers in some modern industry. 
The family is certainly not rich, but neither is it 
poor. It is industrious, self-respecting, and anxious 
to give its children the best possible preparation for 
a useful and comfortable life. Such families are the 
bone and sinew of America, and it is toward their 
needs and their strengthening that the main energies 
of public education should first and always be di- 
rected. 

If this average boy happens to be born into a 
family of farmers, his education will be given to him 
largely at home — in the house through "chores," 
and on the farm through planting, reaping, and the 
care of animals. As a rule, this training will meet 
so well his fundamental needs — provided he re- 
mains a farmer — that the fact of his being inade- 
quately taught in a rural school by a woman re- 
ceiving less than three hundred dollars a year does 
not very much matter. His schooling will be poor, 
but his education will be fairly good. 

Should this boy be born, however, into a family 
depending, directly or indirectly, upon manufac- 
turing for its living — and it is with this fast- 
multiplying type that modern life is most concerned 
— he must look for almost his entire education, as 



6 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

well as for his mere instruction, to the teaching of 
the public school. Therefore it is vital to him, vital 
to industry, above all vital to society, that the 
education which he receives in that school should 
prepare him to make the most of his subsequent life 
as a worker, as a citizen, and as a man. This com- 
prehensive preparation the average school does not 
give; and because it does not we are not only squan- 
dering our chief industrial and civic resources, we 
are stunting and wasting innumerable human lives. 

Our "national ash-heap" represents the burning 
each year of almost as many buildings as we erect. 
Ignorant and careless forestry is using up our trees 
faster than nature can create them. But these and 
other well-recognized wastes, colossal as they are, 
count for little in comparison with the needless 
squandering of our greatest resource: human energy. 
Society, in one way or another, has spent at least 
^4,000 on every child who reaches the age of eighteen 
years. Taking the annual increase of population as 
one million, this means a potential increment each 
year in our working capital, from this single source, 
of four billion dollars. What do we do, however, 
with this stupendous human asset worth, if rightly 
trained, at least twice this four thousand million 
dollars.'* 

A considerable proportion of it we kill off, before 



THE AVERAGE BOY 7 

it reaches twenty-five years, by accidents, half of 
which, by mechanical safeguards and by education, 
are easily avoidable. A much larger percentage we 
destroy by diseases, two thirds of which, by right 
training in simple hygiene, are preventable. A 
portion difficult to measure, but obviously large, is 
permitted to go to waste through intemperance, vice 
and crime, the result, in most instances, of ignorance 
or mal-education. And from the balance of this 
human capital we secure really effective service, 
economic, social and political, in the case of only a 
most pitiful minority. 

The United States spent upon public education in 
1909 (the latest year for which figures are available) 
^401,000,000, and for hospitals, reformatories, asy- 
lums, poorhouses, etc., it undoubtedly paid a sum 
almost as vast. With this immense outlay, however, 
two things were wrong: The millions lavished upon 
prisons and refuges ought to have been almost 
wholly available for education, and they would have 
been available had the millions spent upon education 
been handled in a wise and businesslike way. 

What is the matter with our school expenditure? 
In the first place, large as it is, it is not nearly suffi- 
cient to accomplish what public education ought to 
do. Any manufacturer knows that to be niggardly 
in providing machinery and brains is the most 



8 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

foolish of policies; and that many an establishment 
which, by expending fifty thousand a year, invites 
bankruptcy, would, if it paid out twice that amount, 
command prosperity. In the second place, this 
expenditure is in the hands not of experts but of 
amateurs — of school boards whose members know 
little or nothing concerning this stupendous enter- 
prise over which they have autocratic control; of 
teachers a majority of whom are untrained and who 
regard their occupation merely as a makeshift; and, 
in too many cases, of corrupt politicians who look 
upon the schools as so much added loot in their 
sacking of the modern Babylons. 

Think of it! A business capitalized at nearly 
eight billions of dollars, in which, therefore, every 
man, woman, and child has one hundred dollars at 
stake; a business, moreover, having branches in 
every city and town and in almost every hamlet of 
the United States, is carried on — with many no- 
table exceptions which but emphasize the general 
inadequacy — by boards of directors who know 
practically nothing about it, and by agents who are 
largely untrained, underpaid, and temporary. The 
business, moreover, is so unsafeguarded as to be at 
the mercy of any unscrupulous men who may desire 
to use it as a means to their own political fortunes 
or as a quarry for their "honest graft. " This would 



THE AVERAGE BOY 9 

be bad enough were it a business having to do with 
mere things; how infinitely worse is it when the enter- 
prise deals with the bodies, minds, and souls of boys 
and girls! 

Even the best school boards are composed of 
business men confessedly unacquainted with edu- 
cation since their schoolboy days, while the worst 
are made up of "heelers" with eyes glued upon the 
funds available for graft or bribery. Yet school 
boards, be they good or bad, have full power over 
school officers and teachers, the provisions for 
teaching, and the courses of study. They deter- 
mine absolutely, therefore, the education of every 
public-school child. Is it to be wondered at that 
school superintendents, even where they exist at all, 
are most successful when they are most politic; 
that teachers have little genuine interest in a pro- 
fession dominated by the untrained or worse; 
and that there are not a few cities in which are to 
be found some school teachers whom no decent 
girl or boy should know.^ 

The confessions of experienced school superin- 
tendents would make disheartening reading. They 
would be stories, mainly, of dealing with petty 
despots, ignorant of education, but eager to exer- 
cise their absolute authority — stories, therefore, of 
intrigue, of the flattering of pomposity, of catering 



10 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

to personal weaknesses, of wearing away unreason- 
ing prejudices, of yielding to improper pressure from 
those having life-and-death power over one's career, 
of sacrificing the children to save the teachers and 
to save one's self. The confessions of teachers would 
be mainly of high ideals giving way under the pres- 
sure of dry routine, of petty tyrannies from superiors 
themselves the victims of a higher tyranny, of indig- 
nities (if the teacher be a woman) proffered by al- 
leged gentlemen screened from exposure by their 
vested power, or (if he be a man) of false but dam- 
ning charges brought by mischief-making or per- 
verted girls. 

This atmosphere of repression, of petty despot- 
ism, of intrigue, of frequent humiliation is the very 
last in which to develop initiative in teaching, bold- 
ness of experimentation, readiness to meet the de- 
mands of modern life. Where even the daily rou- 
tine is full of quicksands, neither superintendent nor 
teacher can be expected to go very far afield. The 
margin between the daily wage and starvation is 
too narrow. When a man has only thin bread and 
scanty butter he is least likely, as the phrase is, to 
quarrel with it by showing independence or seeking 
grounds for strife. Yet there is not a community, 
not an industry, scarcely a family, which is not 
suffering grievously for want of what right educa- 



THE AVERAGE BOY ii 

tion alone can give. And that right education will 
not come until teachers are so broadly trained, so 
professionally in earnest, so freed from ignorant or 
improper dictation, so confident of public support 
and commendation that they will be true leaders 
getting youth really ready to meet the new demands 
of to-morrow, instead of being timid conservatives 
holding back civilization by loading it down with 
hordes of incompetents, ill-taught, untrained, and to 
all intents and purposes totally uneducated. 

Relief can come, moreover, only through the 
school; for this business of public education is one 
of the completest of monopolies. The state, through 
its sovereign power, seizes the average boy when he 
is five or six and holds him until he is fourteen or, 
in some instances, sixteen. It preempts him, there- 
fore, during his most formative years, and declares 
that it alone shall determine how he is to be pre- 
pared for life. This is as it should be, for to leave 
education in private hands would be fatal to democ- 
racy. Since, however, the state thus exercises a 
giant's strength, it is morally bound to use that 
power wisely, and to give every boy and girl, as far 
as possible, just the kind and amount of education 
which that particular child ought specially to have. 
Does the city or town (through which the state acts) 
commonly do this? Far from it. On the contrary, 



12 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

it puts the average child through a routine of in- 
struction which has little if any relation to his real 
needs, and which, in too many cases, leaves him at 
fourteen just as helpless and almost as ignorant of 
the essential things of life as when the school took 
hold of him at five. 

When the child enters the primary school, theo- 
retically he begins a course of training which is to 
develop his mind, his body, his aptitudes, and his 
powers, so that each year will find him a considerable 
stage farther on his journey toward the true goal of 
public education — that of self-respecting, self- 
reliant, capable, intelligent American citizenship. 
As a matter of fact, however, the boy enters at five 
or six years of age the first roller of a sort of gigantic 
squeeze-press, which will endeavor, during the next 
eight or nine years, to stamp certain more or less 
useless facts upon his unwilling, because uninter- 
ested, memory, and to mold his sacred personality 
into the same pattern as that of a hundred thousand 
other little products of the pedagogical machine. 
The boy wants to ask questions; but in a "well- 
regulated" school it is the teacher who asks ques- 
tions, and the child's part is to give the answers set 
down in the text-books furnished by those publishers 
who happen just then to "control," directly or in- 
directly, the school policies. The story is credibly 



THE AVERAGE BOY 13 

told of a primary teacher who declared that kinder- 
garten children are a great nuisance when they 
first come to the primary grades, because they ask 
so many questions. "But," she triumphantly con- 
cluded, "I soon cure them!" 

The boy wants to exercise his rapidly growing 
muscles; but, since movement upsets order, he must 
learn to curb his nature and to diminish his vitality 
by sitting still in a hard wooden seat before a desk 
that holds him like the stocks. He wants to make 
something, to see some tangible result from all these 
weary hours in school; but the teacher has no idea 
how to make things, the text-books say nothing 
about it, and young people who make things are apt 
to be exuberant, eager, full of questioning. There- 
fore all that power for good which might come out 
of the child's natural desire to plan, to shape, and to 
build is allowed to go to waste, and the constructive, 
creative instinct, which is the mainspring of edu- 
cation, is permitted to wither away. If the pupil, 
thus thwarted, fails to perceive the use of those 
things which he is permitted to do, the teacher as- 
sures him that he will see by and by. When that 
far-off time arrives, however, if it ever does, the 
useless things have been utterly forgotten. 

The average boy wants to work, as well as to 
play, with the other boys, to learn how to get along 



14 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

with them, to exercise his powers of leadership: in 
short, to practise democracy. Instead of this, he is 
kept isolated at a separate desk, there to do by him- 
self a task simultaneously allotted to all the class; 
and cooperation in this task is not only forbidden, 
but punished as a crime. He wants to organize a 
miniature society, to learn how to behave himself 
in the world of boys and men. "But, my dear child, 
this is school, and school, you know, is a very dif- 
ferent place from the street." Consequently he 
loves the street, because it is so different, and hates 
the school. 

A child who amounts to anything wants to exer- 
cise his initiative, to make individual plans. That, 
however, would upset the lesson schedule, would 
make it hard to railroad the whole fifty children 
forward into the next grade, would preclude treat- 
ing the school-body as a miniature army. Therefore 
it cannot be allowed. In fact, almost everything is 
done in the average school to repress the pupil, 
instead of to expand him, and to substitute the 
teacher's will — and an extremely nervous and er- 
' ratic will it sometimes Is — for the boy's will. Con- 
sequently the school which, theoretically, exists to 
develop a youth and to teach him how to discipline 
himself, succeeds, in a year or two. In destroying 
the poor boy's individuality and In killing, through 



THE AVERAGE BOY 15 

a process of subjugation, his very will itself. He asks 
for exercise, mental, moral, and physical, and we 
put him in a strait-jacket; he asks for experience of 
life, and we feed him on predigested — and neverthe- 
less still indigestible — facts; he asks to do something, 
and we tell him that the place to do things is else- 
where, yet censure him for exploding, out of school, 
into mischief, petty crime, and worse. 

Who has built up this educational machine which 
so often succeeds in defeating all the proper ends of 
education? The school boards and the school- 
masters, in order to meet the problem of dealing 
cheaply with enormous crowds. But who forces 
this economy? The taxpayers, who will not under- 
stand that the thorough education of the whole 
child for real life can be carried on only In small 
classes, by professionally trained teachers, under 
expert supervision; and that this is tremendously 
expensive in the paying out of money, but enor- 
mously economical in the saving of human life and 
energy. But what forces the schoolmasters not 
simply to treat the school children as an army, but 
to keep that army locking step and marking time? 
The examination system. And who force the school- 
masters to make examinations the supreme end, in- 
stead of a very subordinate means, in the educational 
process? The colleges. It suggests the familiar 



i6 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

nursery rhyme of the old woman and her balky pig. 
The college begins to beat the high school, the high 
school begins to beat the grammar school, the gram- 
mar school begins to beat the primary school, and 
all together they metaphorically beat and push the 
unwilling pupil for eight or nine years, while the 
law holds him fast. And all this memorizing, rote- 
work, problem-solving, and gerund-grinding mainly 
in order that ten pupils out of every five hundred 
may progress to college! 

The average pupil does not want to go to college. 
In nine cases out of ten he ought not to go. Cer- 
tainly, however, neither he nor any other youth 
should be sent there by way of a stupid routine of 
text-book studies devised as a preparation for 
passing, when eighteen or nineteen years old, an 
assortment of foolish examination papers prepared 
by men who, most of them, know as little of the needs 
and capacities of the average boy as they do of the 
inhabitants of Mars. 

From the moment he enters the primary school 
all his teachers should be anxious to send the boy to 
college; but they should really find out whether or 
not he is fitted to go there, through a process of 
studying and expanding him, of giving full play to 
his individuality, of permitting him to prove that he 
is worth the highest intellectual training which can 



THE AVERAGE BOY 17 

be secured. And even then the goal should not be 
college, but life — his life, real life, the life of the 
good citizen and efficient worker. 

Every boy must be given, of course, certain basic 
acquirements, like reading and writing; he must be 
put in possession of certain common tools, like the 
multiplication table and the outlines of geography; 
and he must be subjected to so much military disci- 
pline and hard routine as will make him orderly 
and obedient. But what that boy goes to school 
for, primarily, is to be developed; and never yet did 
development result from continual repression. He 
should be taught to see with his brain as well as 
with his eyes. He should be trained to hear with 
his mind as well as with his ears. He should be 
encouraged to do anything and everything, within 
reason, with his hands. Above all, he should be 
really educated through training him to coordinate 
all his senses and powers so that they will work ac- 
curately, unflaggingly, and intelligently, so that 
each will reinforce and strengthen all the others. 
What the community wants in that boy at the end 
of his nine years of schooling is efficiency: ability 
to do whatever he can do and does do thoroughly, 
intelligently, enthusiastically, and well. 

Every school child should have, therefore, mind 
training and book learning, but he should have also, 



i8 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

and all the time, body training, sense training, 
manual training, and industrial training. He should 
be taught not a trade, but the fundamentals which 
lie at the basis of all industries. He should not be 
made a skilled workman, but should be so far de- 
veloped that, within a reasonable time after leaving 
school, he may become capable and eifective in 
whatever line of activity he undertakes. Genuine in- 
dustrial training should begin at the first and should 
not end until the last day of the boy's school life. 
It should be, moreover, a gradually enlarging and 
expanding exercise of the entire boy. Such train- 
ing provides for the pupil that physical activity 
which is absolutely essential; it places before him 
those tangible results of effort which the child must 
absolutely see; it permits him to exercise and to 
develop power of initiative; it teaches him how to 
work with other boys; best of all, it gives the child 
in school some positive and definite aim. As it is 
now, unless he has before him those remote college 
examinations, he can see absolutely no educational 
goal; and, since no man can do effective work with- 
out an aim, why should the child be expected to 
show enthusiasm in walking a treadmill, merely for 
the sake of exercise? With industrial training, the 
boy can understand how the school is preparing 
him to be a worker, to take his place in the great 



THE AVERAGE BOY 19 

order of society, to reach the goal of effective and 
honorable citizenship. It is a social crime to set 
a boy adrift at fourteen or sixteen without having 
given him those fundamental powers which will 
permit him to become at majority, not only self- 
supporting, but able to marry and to rear, In decency, 
a family. 

The average boy has, therefore, a serious griev- 
ance, not against his teachers, but against society, 
which forces mechanical teaching upon the schools 
by requiring ill-paid teachers to instruct twice as 
many children as can be controlled by any except 
military methods. He has an added grievance 
against the colleges, which largely determine what 
those children shall study from their very first en- 
trance into school. And he has a further griev- 
ance against the industries which, knowing that 90 
per cent, of all youth trained in the public schools 
are to enter their ranks, stupidly acquiesce in a sys- 
tem that, If It prepares for any life-work at all, 
fits only the petty salesman and the clerk. 

These grievances, moreover, are shared by every 
citizen, for, sooner or later, all of us must pay the 
costs of this colossal and needless waste of human 
energy. If we do not spend money for the right 
kind of education for the average boy, we must spend 
much larger sums on jails, prisons, asylums, hospitals. 



20 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

and almshouses, since hundreds of thousands of 
those average boys become incompetent, diseased, 
or vicious men. These larger sums, if we chose to 
take the trouble, we could count, for we would find 
them in our tax-bills; but they are as nothing com- 
pared with the sums which we cannot count and 
which we lose through the industrial inefficiency of 
untrained, unambitious, lazy, half-sick, maimed, or 
stunted workers in every type of work. 

What is to be done? What every modern busi- 
ness does when it finds Itself confronted with possi- 
ble bankruptcy through preventable wastes, losses, 
and inferiority of output. It calls in engineering 
and commercial experts to locate causes and to 
suggest reforms. We need "educational engineers" 
to study this huge business of preparing youth for 
life, to find out where it is good, where it is wasteful, 
where it is out of touch with modern requirements, 
where and why its output fails ; and to make report 
in such form and with such weight of evidence that 
the most conventional teacher and the most in- 
different citizen must pay heed. 

Such engineers would make a thorough study of 
(i) the pupils, who constitute the raw material of 
the business of education; (2) the buildings and other 
facilities for teaching, which make up the plant; 
(3) the school boards and teaching staff, who cor- 



THE AVERAGE BOY 21 

respond to the directorate and the working force; 
(4) the means and methods of instruction and de- 
velopment; (5) the demands of society in general 
and of industry in particular upon boys and girls — 
this corresponding to the problem of markets; and 
(6) the question of costs, which is almost purely a 
business problem. 

Even to suggest what such a report would be is 
presumptuous. We know only that it would be 
voluminous and that, if fearlessly made, it would 
shatter many illusions as to the scope and effec- 
tiveness of the average public school. It is not im- 
proper, however, to anticipate some of the main 
findings of such a report, for those findings are 
common knowledge among students of education. 
Under the first division, that of raw material, the 
soundness of which is fundamental to the whole 
industry of effective education, the experts would 
find among the pupils, most of whom were born 
healthy, an enormous proportion of physical im- 
perfection, such as stuntedness, rickets, malnutrition, 
impaired sight or hearing, adenoids, hypertrophied 
tonsils, decayed teeth, tuberculosis, scrofula, and 
other organic disease, together with an appalling 
array of nervous disorders or of tendencies thereto; 
and they would find a large proportion of these to 
have been induced through pure ignorance, which 



22 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

it should have been the fundamental business of 
public education to combat. 

Under the second division, that of plant, the 
experts would find two leading types of defect. 
They would meet, on the one hand, with buildings 
so badly placed, lighted, ventilated, and equipped 
as to be unfit for habitation or for teaching; while 
they would find, on the other hand, buildings so 
magnificent and so elaborately furnished as to have 
made the citizens and the school authorities forget 
that the main essential in education is not the house 
and the apparatus, but the teaching staff. 

Under the third division, that of personnel, the 
educational engineers would find, as has already been 
indicated, inadequate salaries, incompetence, lack 
of professional spirit, and a general disorganization 
due to the fact that those who are not expert in the 
profession of education have autocratic power over 
those who are. 

Under the fourth and fifth sections, those of 
methods and of markets, the experts would note, as 
has also been already indicated, a wide divergence be- 
tween what education is doing and what its products 
are called upon to do. Here they would find, proba- 
bly, the largest field for reform in bringing the work 
of the common schools up to the genuine needs of 
modern life and of its complex demands. 



THE AVERAGE BOY 23 

Under the final heading, that of costs, they would 
discover, of course, much waste and graft (genuine 
and "honest"), much petty saving in vital matters 
and much foolish spending in non-essential things. 
They would discover, in short, most, if not all, 
of the leakages and inefficiencies seemingly in- 
separable, at present, from enterprises conducted 
by the people through agents chosen by political 
processes. 

Were one to venture to forecast the main recom- 
mendations for reform in the common schools that 
would be made by these "educational engineers," 
they would certainly be found to include: 

Much larger school appropriations, together with 
better systems of business management; 

Much smaller classes (not to exceed twenty-five) ; 

Higher salaries to competent teachers; 

Better training for teachers; 

A reorganization of most normal schools in order 
to bring about that better training; 

The organization of the teaching profession (like 
that of law, of medicine, and of engineering) for 
the purpose of promoting higher professional 
standards; 

Limitation of the authority of school boards to 
matters non-educational; 



24 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

Establishing of school "faculties" with authority, 
under the superintendent, over all educational 
questions; 

Development of a rational and diversified school 
program to meet the life-needs of the average 
pupil, not the artificial examination standards 
of the colleges; 

School buildings simply planned and furnished, 
but properly ventilated, heated, and lighted; 

Ample provision for physical training and for 
health teaching; 

Education of each child as an individual, with due 
regard to his present aptitudes and future 
prospects; 

"Social education" — that is, the training of the 
child to live usefully and happily with and for 
his fellows; and 

Wise development of manual and industrial edu- 
cation, leading to vocational training. 

Every one of these recommendations could be 
carried out without any dislocation of the present 
social order; and, were they heeded and put in 
practice, the mental and industrial efficiency of 
every average boy and girl would be markedly in- 
creased, the percentage of life-failures would be 
immensely decreased, and the proportion of those 



THE AVERAGE BOY 25 

who really accomplish something toward the ad- 
vancing of civilization would grow by leaps and 
bounds. We would then conserve what we now 
so scandalously waste: the most valuable of earthly 
assets, human energy. 



CHAPTER II 

THE COMMON SCHOOL 



< 



IN THAT interesting book, the "Life of 
Edward Thring," the mobilizing school- 
master who led Uppingham school out of 
such Egyptian darkness of trustee incompetence 
and hygienic sloth as seems incredible, are given 
a number of letters frankly expressing his opinion 
of the American public school. Thring was a Con- 
servative in politics, a Classicist in education, a 
great mind exasperated by English beadledom. He 
is a biased judge, therefore, when he declares that 
"... providing teaching for all the poor out of 
the taxes paid by those who can pay, which is mis- 
called free education ... is dishonest . . . 
is a mistake ... is deadly. Free education," 
he continues, " is nothing more nor less than ' free 
beer' for the vicious, paid for by a payment of the 
good citizens which is not free. If the tax is taken 
without unanimous consent, then it is sheer robbery 
. . . if it is given by unanimous consent, it is 
simply the old fallacy over again of the rich man 

26 



THE COMMON SCHOOL 27 

preferring to breed beggars by giving shillings to 
beggars rather than to bear the inconvenience of 
listening to their whining, meeting their violence, 
or investigating and correcting the cause of the evil. 
. . . Rescuing the pauper child from moral 
death is an utterly different thing from pauperizing 
the poor and rich by maintaining children whose 
parents can and ought to do it." 

Thring believed free education to be dishonest 
because it allows parents to shirk parental account- 
ability; to be a mistake because it tends to put 
amateurs in control of education; to be deadly be- 
cause it replaces private enterprise, which would 
be interested and progressive for its own sake, by an 
irregular, fickle, and timid public responsibility. 
He acknowledged that the common school can give 
instruction — indeed, he advocated free schools 
for teaching the elements to the very poor — but 
he maintained, rightly, that education is a much 
more complicated, delicate, elaborate process than 
is involved in learning to read, write, and cipher; 
and, in his belief, this true education is beyond the 
power of any present democratic state to give. 
Challenged by such a man as he, it becomes us to 
see if he be right, and to inquire if our free schools 
are providing not simply good instruction but a 
real and superior education. If these public schools 



28 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

of ours are not doing this, if they are not giving to 
every child, or, at least, to a majority of them, the 
completest training for life that any other prac- 
ticable system could furnish, then, even at the sur- 
render of our most cherished sentiments, the free 
school should give place to a fair trial of private 
education. 

It is indeed difficult logically to justify free pub- 
lic schooling. But so it is to defend many other 
schemes of social cooperation adopted, and, most 
fortunately, by modern statesmen. Government, 
defying economic rules, is largely a question of high 
expediency. We hold by our free schools, not be- 
cause we perceive an abstract justice in taxing a 
childless man to train the many children of his 
neighbor, but because public education seems to us 
to compass two desirable ends: it gives (in theory 
at least) every child that fair chance which many 
parents either cannot or will not provide; it makes 
the Republic safer by placing it in the hands of men 
who have shared a common schooling rather than 
in the hands of those the inequality of whose for- 
tunes has been vastly emphasized by unequal op- 
portunities for getting an education. 

Quite as much for our sakes as for theirs we re- 
quire all children' of certain ages to attend school 
and, directly or indirectly, tax ourselves to pay for 



THE COMMON SCHOOL 29 

this free teaching. But In paying taxes and in vot- 
ing for a school board — supposing even that we do 
the first cheerfully and the second with some shadow 
of knowledge of the candidates — we are fulfilling 
but a small part of our duty to youth and to our- 
selves. There are at least two other obligations. 
The first of these — since we compel the child to 
go — is to make sure that his schooling is the best 
obtainable; the second — since we contribute so 
much to the cause of education — is to make cer- 
tain that we secure the equivalent of this money 
in the quality of citizenship which the schools pro- 
duce. If we acknowledge the wisdom of educating 
every child, and if, not simply recognizing it, we 
actually compel it and set up a system against 
which private enterprise is powerless to compete, 
it would seem but plain duty to make this com- 
pulsory education humanly perfect. Even failing, 
however, to recognize this moral obligation, it still 
remains extraordinary that a nation so shrewd as 
ours, lavishing millions upon free education, should 
not look more closely to it that industrial capacity, 
mental and physical strength, and effective citizen- 
ship result. 

The simpler duty of the public school, that of 
instruction, has been always understood. Indeed, 
for many years it was recognized as the only func- 



30 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

tion of free education; and there are still many- 
citizens who have no idea of it beyond this limita- 
tion. Those among them who have given any 
thought to the matter probably will maintain that 
everything beyond bare instruction belongs to the 
home and to the church. Truly, to these two 
agencies does attach a work of ethical and religious 
training which none other can do; but the child's 
life cannot be parceled out among the several 
agencies of its development, one to promote its 
physical, another its intellectual, a third its ethical 
growth. The boy's education on all sides is and 
must be continuous. The all-round development 
of the child demands that every force which is to 
have any permanent and valuable effect upon him 
must be all-round too. The good, or the harm, of 
the parental influence comes mainly through the 
informal, unperceived effect of the daily life of the 
home. The enormous influence of the streets (and 
of more hidden byways) is also unconscious, not 
being recognized as educational at all. The school 
work alone has been called education, because it is 
tangible and confined mainly to examinable in- 
struction. But, for this very reason, it has been 
narrow and of limited value. To increase in worth, 
to become of real interest and use to the pupil, the 
school must take a lesson from the home, from the 



THE COMMON SCHOOL 31 

street, from the daily, passing show of the child's 
life; must make its interests as broad as those, as 
susceptible of various and special assimilation as 
those, as interesting as those, and, as far as is possible 
under its necessary limitations, as unconscious as 
those. So long as it does its full duty to the whole 
child in this broad way the school need not ,'ask jif it 
be usurping the prerogatives of the home and the 
church; for, if they do their full duty, they too will 
trench equally upon its territory. Failing to have 
regard for any but his intellectual progress, the 
school will have little interest for the pupil, will 
produce almost no effect upon him, will make no 
vital contribution to his real education. Either must 
one deny altogether the principle of free schools, 
or he must agree with Thring that they are meant 
only for paupers, or he must acknowledge that their 
responsibility goes far beyond the teaching of the 
three R's. 

A man's real success In life is determined by two 
things: the degree of development of his faculties 
and his conduct as a member of society. It follows, 
therefore, that the two main ends to be sought by a 
public school are to give the boy command over him- 
self and to teach him how to be a useful citizen. 
That is to say, public education exists in order to 
develop human power, and the kinds to be developed 



32 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

by a school are two: social power and personal 
power. The school must do the most it can to per- 
fect every one of its pupils in the ability to play the 
largest part possible to him in the life of the com- 
munity; it must help him, also, to make the most of 
himself. Of course these two ends of education 
intertwine. One cannot make a boy a good citizen 
without making him, at the same time, a better man; 
neither can one make him a good man without pro- 
ducing, concurrently, a better citizen. To make a 
boy perform his due part in society he must be 
taught the arts of social life : how to read, write, and 
cipher, how to comport himself, how to maintain 
pleasant relations with his kind. Moreover, this 
body of upgrowing youths must be trained and ac- 
customed to act together, to feel their interde- 
pendence, to see the interrelations of the vast social 
structure, perfection in which has made modern 
civilization possible. But, more than this, the 
school must, so far as it can, train, foster, and direct 
the physical and moral forces of every individual 
child toward his highest individual development. 

The boys who enter a counting-house or factory, 
the girls who take service in a shop or kitchen, the 
citizens who, in uncounted ways, maintain their 
communities and support the sovereign state, must, 
as a rule, know how to read, write, and cipher. To 



THE COMMON SCHOOL 33 

do these things well counts greatly In their favor. 
That so many do not do them well Is a serious charge 
against the public school. These, however, are 
not the fundamental qualities which employers seek 
and which communities require. They demand 
health, character, honesty, truth- telling, clean living; 
they demand willingness to work, readiness to com- 
prehend, quickness of adaptation, fertility of re- 
source, vision; they demand alertness, vigor, self- 
command, dexterity, and muscular control. These 
things, which result, not from set lessons, but from 
self-discipline, self-reliance, self-knowledge, deter- 
mine the success of a boy or girl in life, and these 
qualities the public school must seek to develop 
through every means and every force at Its command. 
Most schools give the child in a reasonable time 
the power to read ; but do they make reading a power 
in his life? Do they show him what there is to read, 
how to get at this enormous store of knowledge and 
recreation, how to absorb the author's thought by 
that mental grasping of the sentence the outward 
evidence of which is an ability to read aloud ? Now 
that the flourished, slanting penmanship is being 
abandoned, writing as an art seems on the way to 
resurrection; but do the schools enable the pupil 
to do anything with this art beyond inditing a clumsy 
letter or making a formless bill.'* Is there, after the 



34 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

ordinary grammar-school course, ready under- 
standing between the brain and the pen-holding 
muscles ? or is it true that to most men and women 
of ordinary education writing is real mental pain? 
And those weary years of arithmetic: do they result 
in the ability to use the four processes readily and 
exactly, do they enable the youth even to keep a 
cash account with ease? And, as to the logical 
faculty that these often involved processes are said 
to stimulate, do we see its results in the eagerness 
with which thousands of our fellow-citizens will 
embrace any fallacy, be it only preached by their 
party newspaper or expounded by some glib-tongued 
rogue? What effect does formal English grammar 
have in preventing that hideous perversion of his 
beautiful mother-tongue in which the average man 
apparently delights? Does our school geography 
dissuade that same average man from scorning all 
other nations, their thoughts and customs, as foreign 
and therefore foolish? And do we teach history in 
such wise as to breed real patriots: not shouting 
swashbucklers, but men who feel a deep sense of 
responsibility toward their country, who will not 
let its cities be the prey of bosses, its legislatures the 
harvest of cheap politicians, its higher places the 
spoil of those who have millions with which to pur- 
chase them ? The simple studies of the elementary 



THE COMMON SCHOOL 35 

school could be so taught as to give this grasp of 
literature, of expression, of reasoning, of number; 
they could be made to yield a real knowledge of the 
world, and a genuine patriotism. More than this, 
they have been made to yield these things over and 
over again in individual schools, both public and 
private. But the instruction given in the usual 
public school does not so result. 

Granting, however, that every year shows an In- 
crease in the number of public schools that do rightly 
teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, using them, 
with their attendant minor studies, as a means of 
education; asserting, as I am ready to do, that in 
time all schools will reach this standard of efficiency; 
they will even then fulfil but the lesser part of their 
duty to the state. "What is the education of a 
majority of the world?" asks Edmund Burke. 
"Reading a parcel of books? No! Restraint and 
discipline, examples of virtue and justice, these are 
what form the education of the world." Self- 
restraint and self-discipline are what public edu- 
cation must instil if it would rightly preface and 
forestall the work of that greater school, the world. 
Without these the furnishing of mere book-learning 
will be like giving dynamite to children and gatling 
guns to war-thirsty savages. 

These virtues which the employer of young men 



36 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

is always seeking and so seldom finds, for which mu- 
nicipal life is crying out, without which the nation 
will perish, does one get them, as a rule, because of, 
or in spite of, the public school training ? Does the 
setting of uniform tasks, with penalties for their 
neglect, either uniform or gauged by the passing 
temper of the teacher, develop an eagerness to work 
and a delight in labor? Do wholesale lessons ex- 
plained by wholesale to sixty children, each one of 
whom has a different mind-content, a different 
means of apprehension, each of whom needs, there- 
fore, special leading over every new difficulty — do 
these tend to promote readiness, quickness, and alert- 
ness? Nothing, on the contrary, could be better 
calculated to dry up that intense eagerness to know, 
that grasping after new ideas, which most children 
come to school with and which, alas! so many go 
away without. Do desiccated text-books, rote-work, 
graded lessons, the whole abominable system of 
yearly promotion, result in that quickness of adap- 
tation, that fertility of resource, which are the very 
soul of civilization? Is honesty encouraged by 
the usual school discipline and methods? Does 
truth-telling always plainly get its reward? Is 
purity fostered by the promiscuous herding of hun- 
dreds of children, old and young, corrupt and inno- 
cent, in the same building, under teachers whose 



THE COMMON SCHOOL 37 

time must be given to mint, anise, and cummin 
rather than to these weightier matters of the Eternal 
Law? Says M. de Coubertin: "Not ignorance and 
sloth of mind threaten our younger generation so 
much as moral inertia and atrophy of the will. 
The supreme problem is to cure these." This moral 
inertia can be overcome, this will of the child can be 
developed and trained, only by treating each pupil 
as a special problem to be worked out with knowl- 
edge, with sympathy, with tact, with enthusiasm, 
by every teacher under whose control the child is 
brought. 

The bottom fallacy of much of the acknowledged 
inefficiency of public education is that equality 
implies uniformity. We are to give all youth an 
equal chance; therefore let us put it through one 
common course of study, therefore let us give it a 
discipline of the barracks. But this is not to secure 
to children an equal opportunity at all. Whose 
omniscience devised this uniform course which is 
so to act upon the antipodal natures of John and 
of Patrick, of Marie and of Tessa as to give them an 
equal chance to develop into their very best? Who 
found this universal solvent of all the oddities, 
stupidities, and personalities of a townful of child 
nature? A uniform course is the very embodiment 
of inequality, making the weak weaker, the dull 



38 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

duller, the cross-grained more out of touch with the 
rest of mankind. Such a course may suit three 
children out of every twenty, but the remaining 
seventeen are mainly stupefied by it, learning oily 
to associate what is most disagreeable, what is most 
useless, what is most quickly to be forgotten with 
those school years during which it was vainly at- 
tempted to fit their tender and growing individ- 
ualities to an arbitrary mold. The only way in 
which to give every child an equal chance with every 
other is to provide for each the atmosphere and in- 
centives suited to his particular needs and nature. 
Then that nature will respond and grow, revealing 
powers and aptitudes inconceivable under the 
blight of uniformity. There is no such thing as an 
"average child." He is a fiction as absurd as the 
passionless man of the old political economy. As 
well might one talk of an average vegetable and sub- 
ject all plants to an unchanging regimen. 

The fundamental principle of the '*new education" 
— which is as old as India and Greece — is to de- 
velop and strengthen individuality. All men are 
born free: you shall not make them slaves to a 
fictitious average. All men are born equal before 
the law: you shall not make them unequal before the 
law by forcing upon them a common training which t 
gives those few whom the course happens to fit an 



THE COMMON SCHOOL 39 

enormous advantage, leaving the rest substantially 
untouched by the real forces of education. So 
much of the military, disciplinary side of the school 
as promotes solidarity, makes children feel them- 
selves to be social units, favors the impulse to activ- 
ity arising from mere mass, is vital to the state. 
The marching together, singing together, playing 
together (provided the play be judiciously organ- 
ized) is a splendid stimulus to social and civic life, 
impossible to be done away with. Along with this, 
however, and all the more strongly because of this, 
the individuality of the child must be nourished, 
promoted, and developed by every rational means. 
Within the range of his powers all health, virtue, 
and capacity are within him as the germ is within 
the seed. The teacher's business is to stimulate, to 
encourage, and also to prune, these elemental forces. 
This cannot be done by instruction given by whole- 
sale, but only through genuine education acting 
directly upon the individual child. 

No startling changes are necessary in the free 
school system. Its general plan is admirably suited 
to American conditions. It needs but to be altered 
in this detail and in that, in the expansion of this 
principle and in the suppression of that practice. 
We must, however, do away with the curse of uni- 
formity, allowing, instead, full play to individuality; 



40 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

we must, furthermore, fit the means and methods 
of the school to the real needs of the future worker 
and citizen; and we must, in addition, make the 
profession of teaching self-respecting by releasing 
it from its present bondage to amateurs: to well- 
intentioned but inexpert school boards who are 
jauntily settling pedagogical problems that appall 
trained experts. The teachers, if they are to teach 
from themselves instead of from prescribed text- 
books, must have a larger share in the control and 
development of schools, and must be so trained and 
stimulated as to be fit to assume that larger share. 
Not elaborate buildings, or reformed courses of 
study, or wiser supervision, will, of themselves, make 
the new education succeed — it will be the teachers ; 
and if this vast responsibilit}'' rests upon them, with 
them must rest also power and initiative, in them 
must appear professional pride far beyond what 
they possess to-day. 

These fine, great schoolhouses, with all modern 
devices — provided their ventilating systems work, 
their floors are kept clean, and their rooms are not 
overcrowded — are admirable; but they do not in 
themselves educate. The complicated apparatus, 
the works of art, the libraries, with which many of 
these schoolhouses are filled, again are admirable; 
but in themselves they are mere sticks and stones. 



THE COMMON SCHOOL 41 

The subdivision of labor among teachers, the call- 
ing in of specialists, the elaboration of methods 
of teaching are — sometimes — excellent; but they 
are but the husks of real education. Psychological 
laboratories, child-study, the heaping up of great 
masses of pedagogical data are also, when backed 
by real knowledge, excellent; but they are only 
minor helps to a real education. Pile buildings, 
apparatus, methods, psychological subtleties high 
as Ossa on Pelion and there will result no better 
education than was given in the ancient district 
school unless behind this complexity of educational 
machinery are real teachers knowing how to teach 
and with time to do true, individual teaching. The 
more we elaborate education, the more time we 
spend on pedagogical minutiae, the more we load 
ourselves down with apparatus, the more plainly it 
appears that the sole essential for real education is 
the educated teacher who knows how to teach. 
Upon his, or her, personal fitness rests the future of 
the country; with him, or with her, not in systems 
and apparatus, lies the solution of this vexed ques- 
tion of the public school. The regeneration of man- 
kind will be brought about, so far as the common 
school can effect it, by the direct, human influence 
of the individual teacher upon the individual pupil. 



CHAPTER III 

EDUCATION AS PREVENTION 

THE Story Is told of a somnolent parson who 
prayed, with that singsong drone which 
used to be inseparable from true piety, 
that "Gawd would make the intemperate, temper- 
ate, the incontinent, continent, and the industrious, 
dustrious." With equal lack of thought, we have 
added that treacherous syllable and have made our 
systems of education not processes of formation but 
processes of ^formation. Education should be 
superlatively a growth in morals; yet, largely through 
our sectarian wranglings, we have reduced it, in too 
many instances, to the lowest terms of unmorality. 
The most important business of society is the moral 
education of the boy and girl. And the watch- 
word of that moral education should be prevention 
— the prevention of disease by building a healthy 
body obedient to hygienic laws; the prevention of 
crime by confirming the innate morality of every 
boy and girl; the prevention of poverty by ed- 
ucation for efficiency; the prevention of insanity, 

42 



EDUCATION AS PREVENTION 43 

feeble-mindedness, blindness, and all the rest of 
those preventable scourges, by breaking the pru- 
rient silence which surrounds the greatest function 
of organic life; the prevention of heathenism by 
applying genuine religion to the experiences of 
every day. 

In doing these things, moreover, it must be real- 
ized that the problems of our sons and daughters 
are not those of their great-grandfathers, are not 
even those we faced. Young Americans are now 
not only of the great world of nations, they are of a 
world that thinks in millions, that avails itself of 
strange new forces, that finds the air too dull a 
medium for intercommunication and seeks to use 
in place of it the subtler ethers. 

We cannot wrestle with satan as our fathers did. 
Rather, like the frontiersman, must we carry the 
pistol of decision at half-cock, grateful if the 
devil's eye and aim do not forestall ours. Morality 
is the eternal and unchanging arsenal of God; but 
the ethical weapons of a youth to-day must differ 
widely from those of a more leisurely, post-chaise 
time, when the mere fulmination of the blunderbuss 
was not uncommonly eflFective. The modern youth 
must have a nimbleness of judgment resting upon 
a solid fund of wisdom, an instant bravery backed 
by steady courage, an adaptability, a resilience of 



44 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

temper, a faith in self — together with a knowledge 
of self-limitations — scarcely imaginable in the 
older days. To know anything he must go right 
to the heart of it; to decide upon anything he must 
focus all his faculties upon it; at every moment he 
must have himself in hand ready to concentrate his 
forces upon the next difficult problem that life is 
certain to present. 

The splendid haste of modern life involves, there- 
fore, enormous new strains — physical, mental, and 
moral. It requires, as a consequence, new tem- 
perings of the springs of thought and action, new 
lubricants for the continually increasing friction of 
existence. These we are gaining; but through 
such a tearing away of old conventions, such an 
opening up of new problems and difficulties, that the 
very life of society seems in jeopardy. The proph- 
ets of impending disaster speak to willing and 
bewildered ears. "The sanctity of the anciently 
accredited ministers and forms of good is disappear- 
ing," they cry; "God Himself at last will be cast 
out and we shall be beasts again! The storm, the 
lightning, and the whirlwind are upon us; surely 
the hot ashes of divine wrath will soon begin to 
fall!" So shouted Carlyle, clamoring for the stern 
virtues of the Cromwell days; so to the end of time 
will every pessimist lament, terrified by the light- 



EDUCATION AS PREVENTION 45 

ning and the whirlwind, heedless of the everlasting, 
still, small Voice. 

Fifty years ago we were predominantly an ag- 
ricultural people, of fairly uniform stock, self- 
contained commercially, and living in small com- 
munities which were patriarchal, simple, genuinely 
democratic, and trained in that flower of political 
schools, the New England town-meeting. To-day 
our cities, our towns, even our farms, are purely 
industrial; we are of every race, creed, and previous 
political experience; we have been launched com- 
mercially into the seething markets of the world; 
the family has been largely superseded by the fac- 
tory; and the town-meeting, for our vast city pop- 
ulations, is a thing unknown. 

Half a century ago the church and the home, 
directly or indirectly, gave that moral background 
and ethical discipline which every child and youth 
must absolutely have. To-day the church gets 
even less hold than the school upon thousands of 
young people, and the houses of many rich, no less 
than the tenements of many poor, are mockeries of 
home. To the middle of the nineteenth century 
the old relations between master and apprentice 
still survived, and the small, simple industries were 
manned by alert New England youth. To-day, 
with insignificant exceptions, a boy must pick up 



46 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

his trade education as best he may, and our huge 
industrial establishments are transmuting poten- 
tial citizens into replaceable parts of an unthinking 
machine. Before the Civil War our people was a 
fairly homogeneous one. To-day hundreds of thou- 
sands are pouring in from every corner of the 
globe, many of them hostile to all forms of govern- 
ment and knowing no distinction between liberty 
and license, most of them needing to be painfully 
taught the very elements of responsible citizenship. 
Fifty years ago every farm and every household 
gave the child daily training in manual dexterity, 
ingenuity, self-reliance, and hard work. To-day no 
city and few country households give any oppor- 
tunity whatever for this fundamental education 
so vital to the child's physical and moral health. 
Most significant of all, the development of ma- 
chinery, with its attendant cooperation and com- 
bination of interests, its resulting wealth, luxury, 
rapid intercommunication, social congestion, and 
complexity, has so bound society together that the 
moral ruin of the meanest youth or the failure to 
assimilate the humblest immigrant affects, as never 
before, the whole civic body. 

The world was never so rich in material wealth, in 
energy, in altruism, in widespread righteousness as 
it is at this very moment. But the forces of growth 



EDUCATION AS PREVENTION 47 

and uplift seem to stand half paralyzed by the rush 
and complexity of modern life. The educational 
authorities are In a whirl of doubt and experi- 
mentation, uncertain how to act. They cannot act 
alone. The solution of the complex problems of 
modern democracy lies, not in academic education, 
but in more democracy, and in education for de- 
mocracy. All good forces — the church, the home, 
the school, the entire body of citizens, high and low, 
informed and ignorant — must work unitedly along 
this fundamental line of advance, this social, moral, 
really common schooling of the people; and these 
should be a few of their common aims: to preserve 
health by abolishing slums, corruption and quack- 
ery; to develop well-balanced efficiency by training 
the body, mind, and hand of every one; to make each 
and every youth self-supporting and self-respecting 
by preparing him to earn a useful living; to fit him 
for true citizenship by steeping him in social rights 
and social obligations; to prepare him for intelligent 
parenthood by preserving and strengthening sound 
family relations; to make him a good neighbor, a 
ripe human being, a complete man (or woman) by 
leading him through the humbler and the higher 
virtues to a knowledge of, love for, and obedience 
toward God. 
To this facing of the facts and therefore. of the 



48 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

real needs in twentieth-century education has the 
scientific habit of thought brought us; but modern 
science has taught us more than this: it has taught 
us how fundamental to all social advance and to all 
true social education is absolute honesty. It has 
made us understand that, just as the man of science 
who juggles with facts is a fool, so any individual or 
group of organizations whose existence is founded 
upon lies, whether those lies be conscious or uncon- 
scious, inherited or newly concocted, is doomed. 

A main evil at the root of modern life is the same 
as in the days of Seneca — the evil that crime needs 
but to be successful to be called virtue and to be 
held up for emulation by the young. The badness 
in our politics (so far as there is badness, for much 
of it is highly exaggerated), the corruption in busi- 
ness (so far as there is corruption, for an enormous 
majority of business men are honest), the scandals 
of society (and it is never to be forgotten that the 
ten vicious get into the newspapers while the ten 
thousand virtuous do not) : all are due to elemental 
vices, to stealing and lying and lust, which corrupt 
the social body, to hypocrisy which tries to twist 
these ugly private sins into a kind of public sanctity, 
and to moral cowardice which fears to call a jewelled 
spade a spade. 

A pressing social and educational problem is, 



EDUCATION AS PREVENTION 49 

therefore, that of moral discipline. Although we 
have outgrown the old compulsions of a personal and 
wrathful God, we must have some categorical im- 
perative with which to galvanize our sluggish wills. 
That categorical imperative is found in the pregnant 
phrase; "Obey the law." Be the law God-made 
or man-made, every social, political, and industrial 
evil is the direct result of some infraction of the law. 
By an appeal to this fundamental morality of law 
we reduce every problem in life to its lowest terms 
and make its fallacies or its solution as definite as 
the rule of three. 

Fortunately, too, the children of the present 
generation are ready to respond to this kind of 
argument more quickly than to any other. They 
have drifted wholly away from the Puritan moorings, 
so that an appeal not merely to revealed religion, but 
to any form of supernatural authority, has with 
them little or no weight. The only awakening 
appeal to-day is to natural causes and logical ef- 
fects. For the whole spirit of modern thought and 
the very atmosphere, no matter how limited, in 
which modern children live, are dominated by 
science, are alive with the consciousness of phys- 
ical, social, mental, and spiritual evolution. And 
the first rule of science, the absolute foundation of 
all evolutionary doctrine, is obedience to law. If 



50 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

it were not certain that a law of nature Is the same 
for all things under all like circumstances, if there 
were ever In any chemical reaction or any physical 
manifestation the slightest failure of any basic laws, 
then the world of science would go utterly to pieces, 
no railroad would dare to run a train, no chemist 
venture to prepare a drug, no physician presume to 
treat a dangerous disease. Train the child, then, 
from his earliest years in obedience, not to your will 
or to mine, but to the will of natural and moral law 
as shown in history, In government, and in the world 
of science, and you give him for his whole subse- 
quent career an ethical foundation, a moral touch- 
stone, and a genuine spine. 

Three lines of activity, then, are being pointed 
out to us by modern science — activities fundamen- 
tal to all physical, mental, and spiritual advance. 
They are: 

(i) The prevention, through effective education, 
of Inefficiency, poverty, disease, defectiveness, 
and crime; 

(2) The overthrow, through moral training, of 
social, commercial, political, and religious sham; 
and 

(3) The building up and exercise of unquestion- 
ing obedience to physical and moral law. 



EDUCATION AS PREVENTION 51 

But these, it will be said, are not new activities; 
the battle against poverty and disease, against cor- 
ruption and sham, has been waging from time im- 
memorial, and with what comparatively dishearten- 
ing success! True; but never till now have we had 
an army with which to wage this war. Never till 
this twentieth century have we been willing to use, 
or have we known how to use, on a large scale, the 
forces of true democracy. If society hopes to ad- 
vance toward right education, real moral courage 
and genuine obedience to law, it can make that 
advance only through those who are to receive that 
education, who are to exercise moral courage, and 
who are to obey the law. 

If we are to overcome poverty, disease, and crime 
through preventive education, whom must we 
educate? The people. If we are to overthrow 
sham, who must be trained to know the false from 
the true? The people. If the laws of God and of 
man are to be kept, who must be taught willing 
obedience ? The people. An autocracy can pal- 
liate crime and poverty and disease by building 
prisons, almshouses, and hospitals; but only a 
democracy can cure those evils by drying up their 
sources. An autocracy can abolish one hypocrisy 
by setting up another; but only a democracy can get 
down to the fundamental realities of things. An 



52 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

autocracy can enforce obedience through guns and 
jails; but only a democracy can voluntarily obey. 

The hope to-day, therefore, of real social advance 
is through a wise, widespread, sympathetic, and real 
use of the potential power of democracy. It is a 
power so stupendous that only a few great souls like 
Jesus and Abraham Lincoln have dared to invoke 
it. The demagogue uses it, of course, for his per- 
sonal and selfish ends; but only fitfully and very 
partially, because the demos does not really respond 
except to great moral calls. But these lines which 
I have tried to indicate are superlatively moral 
issues. Not one of them but has in it a fundamental 
appeal not inferior to that of primitive Christianity 
or of negro emancipation. Incompetence, poverty, 
disease, defectiveness, crime — all these are house- 
fellows with the common man and he will fight to 
the death if he can be shown a way really to con- 
quer them. And if that way involve, as it does, 
moral courage and submission to physical and ethical 
laws, he has them both, born of sufi'ering, born of 
patient doing of his duty, born of centuries of en- 
forced obedience. 

That is a splendid phrase of Theodore Parker's: 
"The people are always true to a good man who 
truly trusts them." And its wisdom has been 
demonstrated over and over again. Just as it is 



EDUCATION AS PREVENTION 53 

being proved by medical studies that practically 
every child, even in the filthiest slum and of the 
foulest parents, is born healthy, so it will be proved 
— when we have really tried democracy — that 
every citizen 'is sound in his social instincts. He 
wants to be decent and useful and self-reliant; he 
wants to be his own master politically; he wants to 
be educated and to have his children trained; he 
wants to live in clean, beautiful and uplifting sur- 
roundings; but he does not know how. In his 
ignorance he falls a prey to his environment which 
has been created, not by himself, but by society — 
by us, that is, who have arrogated to ourselves, 
because of a little more money or education or in- 
herited power, the regulation of all terrestrial and 
of many spiritual things. 

Moreover, if we really utilize, as we are timidly 
beginning to do, the latent powers of democracy, 
we shall eventually free, not simply the so-called 
"masses" of the people; we shall free ourselves. We 
may not suffer the actual hunger and disease and 
hopelessness of the proletariat; but we are co-suf- 
ferers with it in the products of those evils of the 
slum. Therefore, just as the South, through the 
emancipation of the black man, achieved its own 
economic as well as moral freedom; just as England, 
through the compulsory granting of autonomy to 



54 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

the American colonies, gained her own political 
liberty; so the exercise in the United States of real 
democracy will give true democratic freedom to us 
all. 

What is the essence of real democracy? Simply 
getting together. The wars (whether civil, economic, 
or religious) which have devastated the world have 
been wars of mutual ignorance, survivals of the 
time when each cave man fought with every other, 
when the single fact of unacquaintance made one an 
implacable enemy. Growth in civilization has al- 
ways been parallel with progress in mutual under- 
standing. The leader in this process ofjgetting 
together has always been trade; and to-day the 
close and involved relations of commerce are the 
most hopeful guarantees of international peace. 
Business knows no political boundaries; and it is 
business that is leading the way, not only out of that 
worst relic of the old devil-beliefs, war, but into 
those forms of social cooperation which shall bring 
to the intangible affairs of men some such astonish- 
ing gains as have been secured, through mercantile 
cooperation, for their material interests. 

The newspapers, the magazines, the ten thousand 
clubs of amateur reformers are filled with lamen- 
tations over the evils of politics, the corruption of 
cities, the moral dangers swarming around the 



EDUCATION AS PREVENTION 55 

young. They are filled, too, with social remedies, 
with moral panaceas; at the least, with palliatives. 
But the single cure striking at the very root of all 
this evil will be found only when every man under- 
stands that he as an individual is responsible, and 
that through the combined efforts of all citizens, 
not through laws and ordinances, can these wrongs 
be righted. The affairs of this vast social partner- 
ship will be disentangled only when its members 
awaken to the fact that they must be neither silent 
nor sleeping partners, but that every one of them 
must do his share. So long as the college man feels 
himself too well trained to use his powers in helping 
to govern the city, so long as the merchant thinks 
his time too valuable to be spent in developing good 
citizens, so long as the man of leisure, of refinement, 
of brains, is content to shirk his share in carrying 
out this social partnership, just so long will all those 
persons, together with millions of lesser individuals, 
suffer from the waste and extravagance, the cor- 
ruption and demoralization, which make democracy 
still an experiment, its progress fluctuating, and its 
issue yet in doubt. 

To get together, then, is the first step in the proc- 
ess of genuine and permanent reform. We have 
always seen the advantage of organization for politi- 
cal ends and, too often, have become slaves to the 



S6 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

perfection of our partisan machinery. In the last 
thirty years we have learned the advantages of 
business organization; and here again we have be- 
come, in conspicuous instances, the victims of what, 
if properly regulated, is one of the greatest blessings 
to society. Only to-day, however, are we beginning 
to see the even greater importance of social organiza- 
tion if we are to develop mental and moral stamina 
great enough to stand the strains of our political and 
material advance. We cannot organize democracy 
into a single political party, freed from the evils of 
partisanship, because seemingly there will always 
be fundamental differences of political opinion. We 
cannot organize democracy into a great communistic 
trust for the production and distribution of goods, 
because apparently there must always be differences 
of what our forefathers used to call individual 
*^ faculty." But we can, if we choose, organize 
democracy into a great social whole, working for 
the real welfare of society; for the fundamental 
questions of society are moral questions; and on 
those, when we get right down to basic problems, 
there can be and there are no genuine diiferences. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE DEMAND FOR EFFICIENT ADMINISTRATION 

THE great work of the nineteenth century was 
in establishing the machinery of education. 
Vast and efficient as that machinery is, 
however, It suffers, and suffers incalculably, from the 
same evils that afflict most of our civic machinery. 

Every school has upon its staff magnificent, self- 
sacrificing teachers whose lives are a blessing to their 
pupils; but perhaps in the next rooms to those are 
teachers who, by reason of natural incapacity, of 
ill-preparation, of age, or of chronic ill-health, are 
totally unfit to have children for one moment in 
their charge. Some schools are better, others worse, 
than the average; some school buildings are really 
fit for the housing of children, others are worse than 
unfit; in some cities the evils of the present system 
are glaringly obtrusive; in others the personality of 
the teachers, the interest of the parents, or the 
qualifications of the committee members may have 
largely overcome the defects of the machinery. 
Any criticism that may be made must be general 

57 



58 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

and, like all generalizations, may not apply in specific 
instances. But, broadly, it is safe and fair to say 
that the public schools of most American cities are 
diseased, and that the disease which has fastened 
itself upon them is the pestiferous and far-reaching 
one of petty politics. Members of school boards 
are chosen, not because they know anything about 
the difficult problems of education, not even be- 
cause they are notable men of affairs, but simply 
because they belong to a certain party, because they 
want office, and because they have done political 
work that calls for reward: and how reward them 
more cheaply and easily than at the expense of the 
taxpayers ? 

A school board constituted as are those in most 
of the cities of the United States is an anachronism 
in these days of sociological knowledge and of busi- 
ness organization. It is a monstrous outgrowth of 
the old town school committee, an excellent thing 
in its place and generation, but as ill-suited to the 
conditions of modern city life as the town pump and 
the beadle. The external management of the public 
schools is a business problem, like that of running a 
bank, a railroad or a factory; only, since its raw 
material is boys and girls, the right running of it is 
vastly more important than is the conduct of any 
of these other things. 



EFFICIENT ADMINISTRATION 59 

It Is repeatedly declared by the advocates of ex- 
isting conditions that machinery is not everything; 
but there must be machinery to carry on a business 
so vast as that of the public schools; and since there 
must be machinery, in the name of helpless child- 
hood let It be simple, let it be easily run, let it be 
understood of all men and women, let it at least be 
modern and effective. Let It be, in short, a machine 
for the training of every boy and girl into the best 
citizenship; let it not be a huge, cumbersome politi- 
cal mangle In the intricacies of which too many 
little human souls are injured or forever lost. 

It is declared, also, that it is better men and 
women that are needed In school boards, not better 
machinery. True again; no man or woman in any 
city Is too good or too learned for the important 
work of governing the schools; but can one examine 
any great enterprise without seeing that the good- 
ness and knowledge of the Individual are almost 
annulled by a lack of system? Were the great 
English railroads manned by angels, and had not 
their thorough system, how long would their passen- 
gers be safe ? Were the great mills of New England 
to have absolutely perfect employees and yet no 
business methods, no placing of responsibility, how 
long would they continue to turn out salable prod- 
ucts? And has not every American painfully in 



6o NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 



mind the experiences of the Spanish War, where the 
bravest and most virile soldiers the world has ever 
seen came close to utter defeat at Santiago and re- 
turned to their country human wrecks because the 
machinery of the War Department was utterly unfit 
for the task of waging war? If we would have bet- 
ter schools we must have a more businesslike sys- 
tem of carrying them on, a system in harmony with 
the needs and conditions of to-day, not with those of 
a century ago. 

What is the fundamental problem before a com- 
munity? It is not to secure the teaching of this or 
that subject; it is not to maintain a great educational 
system, as a system, at enormous expense. It is 
to devise the simplest means of reaching every indi- 
vidual child, of keeping him for a proper length of 
time under the most invigorating educational in- 
fluences, of making him into the best possible citizen 
that he is capable of becoming. Let this be em- 
phasized, for it lies at the root of the whole matter. 
The public school should seek the best and simplest 
way, not merely of teaching, but of really educat- 
ing, not masses of children, but the individual child, 
so that he may become, not simply instructed, but 
ready to take his proper place as an active, pro- 
ductive citizen. 

As the people have equal rights in the public 



n 



EFFICIENT ADMINISTR.\TION 6i 

schools and as the people pay the bills, it is plain 
that they must be given adequate representation in 
school government. But these representatives of 
theirs, being but trustees of the people's money, 
should have an eye single to the judicious expendi- 
ture of that large sum, should be directly in touch 
with the citizens who have chosen them, should act 
only on such large questions of policy as are within 
their knowledge; should, in short, be simply legis- 
lators, to put in motion and to regulate the ma- 
chinery by which the objects of the public school 
shall be effected. A school board, then, should be 
chosen largely for its administrative fitness, entirely 
without regard to its political affiliations; should be 
small, so that its plain and comparatively simple 
duties of legislation may always be carried on in 
open daylight. In committee of the whole; should be 
fairly permanent, so that it may pursue a steady 
policy; should be dignified and not harassed by 
trivialities, so that men of the highest ability may 
not shrink from service upon it; should be chosen 
not so much for what Its members know (or think 
they know) about education, still less for any deep 
familiarity with city politics, but because they are 
persons of good judgment, of wide knowledge of 
affairs, of deep Interest In the city's welfare, and of 
incorruptible integrity. Given such a school com- 



62 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

mittee of not more than seven members, representing 
the whole municipality (not greedy sections of it), 
and the education of the people would be car- 
ried on in the interest of the people, the city's 
money would be spent, every cent, for the up- 
building of the city, and the administration of 
public education in America would be something 
for which Americans would not be obliged, too often, 
to apologize. 

In an enterprise so vast and affecting so many 
interests as do the public schools, the prime con- 
dition of success is that there should be always and 
everywhere direct responsibility. The school board 
itself, with simple and easily understood duties, 
should be directly responsible to the people who 
elect it. This committee, in turn, should place all 
the administrative and executive duties connected 
with public education in the hands of experts di- 
rectly responsible to it. 

There are two markedly different and clearly de- 
fined sides to school administration : the educational 
side and the business side. As, obviously, no one 
man could supervise them both, it is plain at once 
that there must be two experts, equally responsible 
to the board, equally to be called to account for any 
deficiency in the matters under his control. These 
experts should be a superintendent of education and 



EFFICIENT ADMINISTRATION 63 

a superintendent of business affairs, or more simply, 
a business agent. 

There is little need to dwell upon the duties of 
the business agent; it is enough to say that he should 
be a clear-headed, shrewd, honest man of affairs; 
that he should be paid an adequate salary, and that 
his whole time should be given to the care and 
maintenance of school buildings, to the coiKrol of 
the janitors and engineers, to the purchase and 
care of supplies, to the supervision of the erection 
of new school buildings. This involves large powers, 
but necessary ones if we would exact large responsi- 
bility; and it is only by holding one man to direct 
account that w^e can get the school buildings kept in 
proper condition, can secure adequate janitorial 
service, can relieve the school board from the har- 
assing and corrupting work of buying school supplies. 

Upon the superintendent, thus freed of all busi- 
ness detail, should rest entire responsibility for the 
educational efficiency of the schools, including the 
appointment and dismissal of teachers and the 
determination of courses of study. Such a superin- 
tendent must be an expert in the science and art of 
education, must be a man of broad culture and wide 
views of life, must be a person of boundless zeal, 
ready tact and unflinching moral courage. More- 
over, he should have powers as nearly autocratic as 



64 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

it is wise to give where abuse would entail far- 
spreading mischief; should be assured of tenure of 
office during good service; should have an active 
part, though not a vote, in all meetings of the school 
board; and should have supreme control of and final 
responsibility for all disciplinary measures, including 
the important educational question of truancy. A 
formidable task for one man to assume; but no larger 
than that of many administrative officers in other 
lines of effort, and not too large if the superintendent 
be relieved of all petty matters of business detail, 
and be permitted to devote his whole time and 
thought to those great questions of education, of 
administration, of morale, that now are given 
partly to him, partly to the school board, and mainly 
to no one at all. 

The superintendent should have, of course, as- 
sistants to be eyes and ears for him; but these 
inspectors and reporters of the schools must be di- 
rectly answerable to him, must have such powers 
only as he delegates, and, however freely he may 
seek their advice, must leave him responsible for 
the final decision of all matters of importance. 

Furthermore, in contemplating these enlarged 
duties of the superintendent, it should not be for- 
gotten that there are forces, now scarcely utilized, 
which he might use much to his own assistance and 



EFFICIENT ADMINISTRATION 65 

vastly to the benefit of the schools. Among these 
are the teachers themselves, the truant officers, and 
that more intelligent portion of the public which 
takes an interest in matters of education. 

Perhaps there is no greater waste in the working 
of the present public-school system than of the in- 
tellectual force and enthusiasm of the good teachers. 
Whatever their professional training, whatever their 
zeal, whatever their knowledge gained by years of 
experience with children, they must still teach, in 
practically stereotyped ways, what is laid down to 
be taught In each particular grade. And they must 
teach this matter out of text-books chosen, as a rule, 
with regard only to that thing which does not 
exist — the average child. A teacher's life must be 
spent in trying to mold a heterogeneous collection 
of pupils Into one pattern in time to send them along 
to the next teacher who, in turn, must repeat the 
process. If any teacher, maddened by such a 
wrong, impossible task, rebels, she Is In danger of 
being supplanted; if she expresses dissent to the 
superintendent or the rare committeeman, she is 
viewed with suspicion as a faddist; if she confides 
her woes to her fellow-teachers, they usually counsel 
her to a prudent acquiescence in the things that be. 
As a consequence the process of teaching in the pub- 
lic schools, instead of making a woman wiser and 



66 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

broader and more Influential, tends to harden her, 
along with her poor pupils, into a narrower and 
narrower routine. What a frightful waste of energy 
this is, and how opposed to all true principles of 
teaching. Suppose, for example, that the courses of 
work and the books to be used in a college were to be 
prescribed by the governing board, and that all 
originality of teaching were resolutely discouraged; 
does it seem likely that such a college would se- 
cure able professors ? There should be, therefore, a 
school faculty, similar to a college faculty, wherein 
courses of study, methods of teaching, text-books, 
and the thousand questions of pedagogics should 
have free discussion; wherein every new idea should 
have encouragement; wherein all fair criticism of 
methods or books should have respectful hearing. 

Similarly with the truancy system. It is now a 
part of the great police machine; what an immense 
force for good it would be were it put into the hands 
of the superintendent and made a part of education. 
As it is now in most cities, the main result, if not 
the chief purpose, of the truancy laws is to punish 
the child, instead of to reform him. In a majority 
of cases, truancy is the fault not of the pupil, but 
of his surroundings; yet little or nothing is done to 
improve them or him; after a number of warnings, 
he either drifts out of sight or is sent to a reforming 



EFFICIENT ADMINISTRATION 67 

institution of doubtful efficacy. Yet it is from these 
truants that the criminal class largely is recruited, 
and upon their proper treatment rests, in no small 
degree, the solution of the question of criminal 
reform. The public school has splendid opportu- 
nities to catch these wayward children at the very 
inception of their careers and to make of them decent 
citizens; but we are so accustomed to disregard the 
individual child, we are so filled with the notion of 
the pupil conforming to the system instead of the 
system adapting itself to the child, that we almost 
deliberately create a public process for the manu- 
facturing of criminals. 

Finally, were the public school system made 
homogeneous and professional, were its determina- 
tion to shun politics and seek diligently the things 
of real education made clear, how many intelligent 
men and women would the superintendent have at 
his command, to help in such and so many ways as 
he might indicate; how many parents, now seeking 
stumblingly and often in vain to secure a real edu- 
cation for their children, could he count upon as 
friends and allies; how increasingly he might reckon 
upon the enthusiastic cooperation of the pupils 
themselves, these children who, now dragged un- 
willingly to a school literally for the masses (since 
its pupils are treated only in the mass) would then 



68 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

run gladly to and help eagerly in that school for 
individuals which, through better teachers, better 
methods, smaller classes, more intelligent super- 
vision, would have become, in our cities, the rule 
instead of the exception. No city, however, can 
begin to reach such standards in education until it 
reforms its methods of school government, until it 
places school administration upon that le^^el which 
the best railroads, the most successful mercantile 
enterprises, the most progressive colleges, long ago 
reached. 

This, then, Is the whole framework of the needed 
reforms in the administration of our city schools. 
Such an enlightened administration must have a 
small school board chosen intelligently, and solely on 
the ground of fitness. That committee must con- 
fine its efforts to general questions of legislation 
(with which alone it is wise enough to deal) and 
must delegate all matters of business detail and of 
educational administration to expert subordinates 
whom it must hold to strict and direct account. 
These experts, in turn, must appoint their subor- 
dinates with such care that the best service shall 
be assured, and must hold them to such accounta- 
bility as shall cause that service never to be neglected. 
Finally, the whole machinery of the vast school 
system must be so simple in arrangement, so auto- 



EFFICIENT ADMINISTRATION 69 

matic in its checks and balances, so complete 
in its utilization of every possible good force, that 
there shall never be anything hidden, never any 
fault overlooked in the multiplicity of detail, never 
any child, no matter how humble, either kept out 
of the best education that he is capable of assimi- 
lating, or treated in any other way than as a sacred 
individuality in which lies the infinite promise of 
a human soul. 



CHAPTER V 

THE DEMAND FOR A TRUE PROFESSION OF TEACHING 

THEORETICALLY, free public education 
should be the supreme force in every 
community; practically, it is not. Theo- 
retically, the extension of such education should be 
followed by a higher political morality, a deeper 
sense of social responsibility; practically, it is not. 
Theoretically, the teacher — spiritual or temporal — 
should be honored above all other men; practically, 
he is not. Who is to blame? Mainly the parent, 
to whom, as a rule, any of his affairs is of more im- 
portance than the building of his children's char- 
acter. In a measure, also, the community, which 
gives grudgingly to Its schools, holds them in little 
esteem, underpays the teacher, and then despises 
him for being poor. But responsibility lies also, in 
no small measure, with the teachers themselves 
for failing to regard themselves and to exact regard 
as members of the most honorable and important 
of professions. 

Teaching, except as limited to colleges and uni- 

70 



A TRUE PROFESSION OF TEACHING 71 

versities, is not yet even a real profession. The 
ordinary schoolmaster has little of the personal 
weight, of the sense of professional responsibility, 
of what may be called the corporate self-respect, 
of the lawyer, the physician, or the engineer. The 
traditions of the teaching guild do not yet demand 
a wide education, a slow and laborious preparation, 
a careful and humble apprenticeship, such as is re- 
quired for entrance into a really learned profes- 
sion. A broad education and the poise of mind 
which follows it are the vital needs of a great major- 
ity of the public school teachers of to-day. They 
are ceaselessly complaining of a condition of things 
which is indeed grievous, but which is largely of 
their own creation. They demand high place with- 
out qualifying themselves to hold high place; they 
rebel at a not uncommon attitude of contempt or of 
contemptuous toleration on the part of the public, 
but do not purge themselves of the elements which 
excite that contempt; they accuse the parents and 
the public of indifference toward their work, but 
do little to render that work of such quality as to 
forbid indifference. 

There is no reason — except in negligent custom, 
in which the majority of teachers acquiesce — why 
the man or woman who has charge of the mental 
growth of the child should be satisfied with a train- 



72 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

ing less thorough than that of the physician who cares 
for his body, the lawyer who manages his property, 
or the clergyman who ministers to his soul. It is 
idle to claim, as is sometimes done, that there is no 
profession for the teacher to study, that the art of 
teaching comes by nature, and that if there be a 
sort of science of education it will filter out from the 
mistakes and successes of experience. The body 
of the law is but a record of human experiments 
and mistakes in social order; medicine itself is but 
the crystallized result of centuries of empiricism, 
often disastrous, upon the human constitution; 
engineering, founded though it be upon a science 
so exact as mathematics, is the net result of an 
infinite series of blundering attempts to solve the 
innumerable problems of matter and motion. But 
the fact that these professions and the sciences on 
which they rest are always undergoing change, that, 
often, the accepted truth of to-day is the proved 
fallacy of to-morrow, does not lessen their dignity, 
does not discourage their followers from long years 
of preparation for them, does not justify the men 
of these professions in working by rule-of-thumb 
methods and haphazard guesses when it is possible, 
through study, experimentation, and mutual en- 
lightenment, for them to work by known laws, in 
orderly sequence, toward well-defined ends. There 



A TRUE PROFESSION OF TEACHING 73 

is abundant foundation for a science and art of 
education as elaborate and dignified as that of 
medicine; but that science and that art will not 
rightly develop so long as it is regarded — above 
all by the teachers themselves — as possible and 
natural to admit half-taught girls and youths, who 
follow teaching only as a makeshift or a temporary 
means of livelihood, to full fellowship and equal 
honor with the completely educated, laboriously 
trained professional teacher. 

Were there, however, no science and art of teach- 
ing, as such, there would still be abundant reason 
why the primary and secondary teacher, quite as 
much as the college professor, should be soundly 
and broadly educated, should follow a range of study 
and thought far outside and beyond the subjects 
that he teaches. It is the personality of the man, 
the breadth of his grasp of life, the atmosphere which 
he creates and maintains in his schoolroom, that, 
more than anything else, secure his success in teach- 
ing and really develop his pupils. These qualities 
can be secured, in general, only by a sound and 
extensive education. 

No teacher has a right to lament the blindness of 
the public toward the value of his work who has not 
fitted himself in the highest measure really to be a 
teacher. No body of teachers may honestly *'re- 



74 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

solve" for greater recognition and consideration from 
others unless they are themselves doing yeoman 
work toward raising the standards of preparation 
and attainment within their own, so-called, pro- 
fession. So long as low ideals of school work, 
routine instruction, machine-like lesson-hearing, 
haphazard and aimless methods, to say nothing of 
sycophancy and petty politics, are tolerated by the 
teachers themselves, the schools and those who con- 
duct them will fail of due honor and support, 
will fall far short of their possible efficiency, will 
not take their rightful place as the supreme uplift- 
ing force of every democratic community. If It 
be deemed necessary that that profession, the law, 
which governs our social relations, that profes- 
sion, engineering, which builds our structures and 
machines, that profession, medicine, which takes 
care of our perishable bodies, should be governed 
by the strictest rules, should frame elaborate 
codes of ethics, should have only the highest and 
purest aims, purging themselves of all shysters, 
jerry-builders, and quacks, how infinitely more im- 
portant that this profession, teaching, whose work 
is greater, higher, nobler than any of these others, 
should be regarded and should regard itself as a 
sacred guild into which no traffickers or triflers be 
allowed to come, regarding whose work no one but 



A TRUE PROFESSION OF TEACHING 75 

him who knows should have aught to say, whose 
sole aim should be to make of every individual child 
of the millions under its care the very most that can 
be made. 

Nothing less than this highest standard of pro- 
fessionalism should be thought of in teaching work; 
nothing less than this will keep the public schools 
of America at that high point of efficiency which the 
very existence of democracy demands. Citizens, 
parents, intelligent school boards may help the 
teachers, fight for them, applaud them; but the 
teaching profession itself must wage the battle 
which is now on and which is to make that in fact 
and in public estimation the greatest of professions. 
And these teachers will fight this battle, not by 
intriguing for higher salaries and easier positions, not 
by depending upon favoritism for preferment, 
not by giving up the true principles of teaching at 
the behest of laymen, not by shielding incompe- 
tent fellow-teachers, not by regarding their work as 
a mere means of livelihood; but they will make 
their profession great only by making themselves 
and their work great; by regarding every child 
placed under their care as a special problem sent 
by Providence; by studying and thinking and ex- 
perimenting as the lawyer, the physician, the 
engineer study and ponder and experiment; by 



76 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

holding unflinchingly to what they know to be 
right methods; by refusing to countenance any 
teaching that is bad, any ways that are not straight- 
forward; by looking upon their profession as one 
too sacred, too vital, to claim anything less than the 
whole mind and heart and soul. When the teach- 
ers of America, or a majority of them, shall regard 
their work in such a light as this, then, indeed, teach- 
ing will be what it ought to be, the greatest of pro- 
fessions; then will the rewards of money, of fame, of 
public honor come as a matter of course. The 
physician, the lawyer, the engineer, have won their 
high place by years of hard work, by establishing 
standards below which no honorable member of 
their professions is allowed to fall. By like hard 
work and the establishing of like standards, and in 
that way alone, can the teacher, too, make his pro- 
fession great. 

There are certain stock arguments always brought 
forward against the possibility of such high pro- 
fessional standards. The pitifully poor rewards, 
the uncertainty of tenure, the often anomalous 
social position of the teacher — all these and many 
similar disadvantages are advanced as reasons 
why it is not worth while to attempt to raise the 
present standards of attainment. The hosts of glib 
pretenders, the arrogance of ignorant school com- 



A TRUE PROFESSION OF TEACHING 77 

mittees, a cheap and noisy commercialism are, 
It Is said, insurmountable obstacles to the creation 
of a generally high, fine conception of teaching such 
as exists among a few devoted, really • educated 
schoolmasters. A man who adopts the work of 
teaching must have, we are told, something of the 
martyr-spirit, for this profession has In It an ele- 
ment of self-sacrifice which the other high vo- 
cations do not demand. Truly the work of the 
teacher does involve much sacrifice of self; but it 
meets with immediate and tangible reward, in the 
uplifted lives of the children for whom the sacrifice 
Is made. This is a return which even the profes- 
sion of the clergy rarely sees. Moreover, were the 
majority of those who follow the profession of teach- 
ing broadly educated men and women, were there 
an esprit de corps among them such as Is found in 
every other profession, the petty things of teaching 
which now so often overshadow the great things 
would disappear; and the rewards, both material 
and Insubstantial, would be inimitably Increased. 
Rights and privileges would then be eagerly off'ered 
where now they are clamored for In vain. 

The education of the teacher — whether he is to 
deal with infants or with collegians — should be as 
nearly as possible like the best training given to 
the young physician. He should have, in the first 



78 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

place, a general education so broad, so well-balanced, 
so strengthening to the mind, that he is able to deal 
wisely, as a physician is called upon to deal, with 
those problems of character, those perversions of 
mind and morals, those subtle diseases of the will 
that no medicine and no surgeon's knife can reach. 
Having made himself thus a wise man, a proper 
counsellor, the young teacher must next, as the 
medical student does, become familiar with the 
technical details of his profession, learn what is 
known of the mental growth and reactive processes 
of children, study the laws of mental health, the 
modes of its preservation, the methods of stimula- 
ting mind and soul, the effects, good and bad, of 
association: what one might call, in short, the 
pathology of childhood and adolescence. More 
than this, he should make himself, as far as can be 
done theoretically,master of the details of the school- 
room. Next, just as the medical student takes his 
course in the hospitals, the teacher must secure 
practice — real, hard, actual practice — in teach- 
ing, with pupils of every sort and age. And, finally, 
throughout his whole professional preparation, he 
must make a careful analytical and philosophical 
study of the history of education. 

What, beyond anatomy and physiology and 
laboratory work, is the three or four years' course 



A TRUE PROFESSION OF TEACHING 79 

of the medical student except a study, under guid- 
ance, of the history of medicine, of the record of 
human experience concerning the treatment of 
disease, concerning the preservation of health? 
When a young worker in the hospitals meets new 
symptoms, does he guess at the disease which they 
denote, does he experiment first with one drug and 
then with another in the hope that he may hit 
upon something suited to the emergency? Absurd 
supposition! Yet that is what teachers are doing 
every day. A new child comes to them whose moral 
habits and intellectual reaction indicate disease — 
or lack of normal educability. Immediately the 
average teacher runs through his small record of 
experience to ascertain if he has had a pupil of such 
kind before. Finding in his memory a case having 
somewhat similar features, he at once decides that 
the disease is due to such and such abnormalities, 
and must be treated thus and so. If, after a few 
weeks' trial, it is evident that the treatment is not 
successful, he tries another moral and intellectual 
medicine or, more probably, gives the case up and 
subjects the pupil to the general routine discipline 
and diet which, in a rule-of-thumb fashion, he has 
prepared for the average, normal, ought-to-be boy 
or girl. As a result his patient dies, not, unfor- 
tunately, in the flesh, but, what is worse, in the 



8o NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

spirit; and one more victim is added to those slain, 
with the best intentions, by pedagogical malprac- 
tice. 

When the physician, on the contrary, meets ob- 
scure symptoms he goes at once to his record of 
other men's experieilce, to his authoritative books, 
his latest medical journals, his older and wiser 
colleagues. With their help he makes diagnosis of 
the disease and learns the manner of treatment 
approved by experience and analogy. Or, if the 
patient is in good health and desires to perpetuate 
that happy state, the physician, having made a 
careful study of the diet and exercise suited to that 
man's condition, gives him proper advice. In the 
manner of the doctor the good teacher should regard 
every pupil as a patient; either as a well one, to be 
kept in health and to be helped to grow to hi-s fullest 
stature and greatest strength, or as a sick one, to 
be physicked and nursed back, if possible, to mental 
and moral well-being. Every well-trained teacher 
ought, as a matter of course, thus to individualize 
and treat his pupils; his professional instinct should 
impel him to it; he should find his delight, as the 
physician does, in the mere act of healing, in the 
power and influence that his skill has given him. 
Such a schoolmaster, provided he have the teaching 
enthusiasm, just as the successful medical man 



A TRUE PROFESSION OF TEACHING 8i 

must liave the healing fervor, will never question 
the wisdom of his choice of a profession, for he will 
know that he is doing the best and most enduring 
work that It Is in the power of any man to do. 

It is impossible, of course, for many teachers to 
secure such a rounded education as this, based 
upon the training of the physician; but every teacher 
can strive toward it, and every year his striving, 
happily, Is made less laborious. 

A college education, essential as It Is to the highest 
usefulness, does not, It cannot be too often reiter- 
ated, make a teacher. The bachelor's degree is 
but the "articles of apprenticeship"; the real test 
and trial of work only then begins. Doubtless a 
college graduate can lay out and superintend a 
course of study, and can inspire his pupils with 
enthusiasm in the following of such a course, pro- 
vided it be work In science, In mathematics, or In 
literature, in which he purposes, more and more 
deeply, himself to study. But one is not a real 
teacher, as a doctor is a real physician, until he can 
go into a primary or grammar school, plan a course 
of work within the narrow and somewhat arbitrary 
lines which custom has laid down, fit that work to 
the forty different needs of forty pupils, each pupil 
with a distinct and more or less diseased Individuality, 
every one suspicious, every one ready to take ad- 



82 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

vantage of faults and errors, every one certain to 
keep himself, until forced open, tight shut within a 
shell of reserve, of shyness, of boyish defiance, that 
completely hides his individuality. No one is 
really a teacher until he is able, in the year or less 
during which he has control of these forty children, 
to arouse in them the same enthusiasm for their 
reading, arithmetic, and geography that, probably, 
he is perfectly well able to inspire in a special class 
of picked and nearly mature students of biology or 
chemistry or higher mathematics. 

Any young teacher, therefore, who goes im- 
mediately into collegiate work, or even into high- 
school teaching, without serving an apprenticeship 
in the elementary schools, loses a part of his training 
without which his teaching can never be as effective 
as it ought. For in the college or high school he 
will deal only with one phase of mental and moral 
growth, the adolescent; he will see only picked 
pupils; he will deal only with minds mature enough 
to be at least partially self-active and receptive. 
Moreover, he will be always ignorant of the past 
mental and moral history, not only of his own 
pupils, but of all such boys and girls. He will 
know nothing of that shaping process by which, 
following the analogy of educational history, the 
scattered and unformed and ill-disciplined mind of 



A TRUE PROFESSION OF TEACHING S3 

the first primary child is educated into the rudi- 
ments of learning, by which are unlocked for it, 
first, the secrets of the printed page; next, the truths 
and phenomena of science and of history. He will 
see nothing of the development of the child's social 
instinct, of the process of instilling into him the minor 
morals which shall regulate his social intercourse. 
And he will be ignorant, wofully ignorant, of that 
storm and stress period of early adolescence, that 
period in which character is put to the severest test, 
that period in which the teacher has such power for 
good that it fills one with indignation to see how lit- 
tle and how seldom that power is exerted. The 
teacher in the high school and the college takes the 
boy after all the battles which decide his character 
have been fought; and busies himself, too late, in 
trying to correct faults and heal wounds that have 
grown too great for correction and too wide for 
healing. And even his efforts at correction will be, 
often, foolish and mistaken, because he will have 
failed to acquire that fundamental knowledge which 
every teacher ought to possess, a knowledge of the 
growth of childhood from its very first entrance 
into the region of school life. 

If every college man and woman, before entering 
upon the work of teaching, would submit to this 
apprenticeship, and if, in following it, would seri- 



84 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

ously examine into and build up the character of 
every pupil coming under his or her control; if, at 
the same time, the young teachers would profoundly 
study the history of education, would attend con- 
ferences, would seek authoritative counsel, just as 
the doctor studies his authorities and keeps abreast 
with current discovery and thought, they would 
not only strengthen themselves incalculably as 
teachers of the higher subjects, they would leave 
such an impression upon primary teaching as to 
hasten immensely the coming of that golden era 
in teaching when there shall be no child without 
the opportunity for a full development of his in- 
dividuality, no child who may not obtain a real edu- 
cation given by true teachers. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE DEMAND FOR VOCATIONAL TRAINING 

MR. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON points an 
admirable moral in the story of a boy set 
to plow a field and told to run his first 
furrow toward a white horse grazing on the other 
side. The yokel, however, aiming his plow all day 
long at the same unstable mark, the field at night 
was a maze of furrows wandering toward every 
compass-point. Foolish as this young plowman 
was, he at least grasped the fundamental notion 
that a furrow must aim somewhere; while to most 
children in school and youths in college comes never 
a glimpse of the fact that education has any purpose 
or object other than that of imparting some useful 
and much useless information. 

Only at the two extremes of school life — in the 
kindergarten and in the professional school — is 
teaching deliberately given a definite aim; atxd we 
stand amazed at the zeal and enthusiasni which 
result. We see, on the one hand, infants exuber- 
antly willing to work in making things for the father 

85 



86 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

and mother or for use in the group play; we see, 
on the other hand, idle and indifferent youth con- 
verted into omniverous learners and indefatigable 
workers when, in the professional school, they come 
in sight of a definite, bread-and-butter goal. Yet 
we fail to draw the obvious conclusion that motive 
is a tremendously important, if not, indeed, an 
essential, factor in all education. From the kinder- 
garten to the professioanl school, through the ele- 
mentary and secondary grades and the college of 
arts, is a long and weary road; but it is made need- 
lessly difficult for the teacher, while the taught fall 
out in disastrous number, because there is ceaseless 
emphasis upon the details of the marching rather 
than upon the efficiency and power toward which 
the marching leads. 

If one protests against this aimlessness of schools 
and colleges he will be informed that education is to 
strengthen and broaden generally, not to train 
specifically, and that to give it an aim would make 
it narrow, sordid, and material. To prove this 
position will be cited our parent system of edu- 
cation, that of the English public school and uni- 
versity, which has produced a thoughtful and 
dominant race. But the main reason why that 
education has been successful is because it had a 
very definite aim: that of preserving a ruling class 



VOCATIONAL TRAINING 87 

of gentlemen. It matters little what such a body 
studies provided its system of education maintains 
an exclusive atmosphere and upholds accepted tra- 
ditions of gentlemanly honor. But to take, as we 
have, such an essentially aristocratic system and the 
principles upon which it rests as models for the 
wholesale training of a democratic population is, 
to say the least, a curious anomaly. 

More singular still, it is only in these modern 
days, when we most need definiteness in American 
education, that it has exhibited such thorough- 
going aimlessness. The early New England train- 
ing had a very definite goal: that of rearing all chil- 
dren in godliness and of selecting, out of this widely 
pious population, the most promising for a collegiate 
training. The early college, in turn, had the definite 
purpose of training either ministers to men's souls 
or magistrates over their bodies. With the multi- 
plication of sects, however, the religious aim has 
been gradually eliminated, and with the spread of 
real democracy every man has become a potential 
magistrate. Nevertheless, we still cling to the 
type of education which had those vanished aims, 
and, to justify ourselves, maintain that education 
should seek breadth and culture and should therefore 
be kept remote from the alleged narrow and sordid 
needs of daily life. 



&S NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

What are some of the wastes and losses which 
follow from conservative clinging to this wavering 
shadow years after the pedagogical substance of it 
has faded away? Through this false notion of 
keeping daily education remote from daily living 
we are perpetuating the wrong idea that education 
is an aristocratic privilege, not a democratic right; 
we are accentuating the snobbish contention that 
v/ork is vulgar instead of being (as it is) the most 
blessed gift of God; we are making the schooling of 
children a secondary, and often hated, incident In 
their formative years; we are losing by the wayside 
a large proportion of pupils who would greatly profit 
by the right kind of education; we are graduating 
from our educational institutions thousands and tens 
of thousands quite unfitted to grapple with the con- 
ditions of industrial, civic, and family life; and we 
are spending enormous sums in directions where 
they are bringing in no commensurate return in 
good citizenship and effective workmanship. 

There are, however, even more direct industrial 
and moral (for they are inextricably mingled) losses 
resulting from this aimlessness in education, from 
this false belief that if a child and youth be given 
a wide range of general information he will be able 
to focus it, v/hen necessary, upon the specific needs 
of his definite life work. An early product is the 



VOCATIONAL TRAINING 89 

restless parent who, seeing no reason except a 
galling law for keeping his child in school, fills that 
boy with rebellion against what old and young re- 
gard as a foolish sacrifice of valuable working-time. 
This plants in pupils the idea — a seed which finds 
ready ground — that school is something to be taken 
as a medicine and to be escaped as often and as 
early as may be. A second result is that boys and 
girls, as soon as they are released from school, rush 
into the first thing which offers, often blighting, by 
so doing, their whole career. It is deplorable how 
many lives are spoiled, industrially and morally, 
because the youth, being able to do little more than 
read and write, and having no outlook upon real 
life, applies for work at the first sign of "Boy 
wanted," takes a position as office or errand boy, 
learns very little between his fourteenth and seven- 
teenth years except idleness, shirking and vice, and 
arrives at the time when he might begin to do a 
man's work, not only unfitted to take up such labor, 
but actually — to use a vulgar though expressive 
phrase — industrially rotten before he has become 
industrially ripe. A third product of aimlessness is 
the youth or girl who would much better be at work, 
but who is kept uselessly at school because of the 
false notion that even secondary schooling gives a 
certain social prestige, that, in other words, the 



90 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

longer a child is kept from being a useful member 
of society the higher is his place in the social scale. 
Another result of our indefinite education is that the 
industrial world is clamoring for youth who, while 
having no special skill, possess the ability to become 
skilled, without finding, in a vast number of the boys 
turned out from our schools, this needed power. 
There follow from this, of course, the overcrowding 
of the unskilled occupations, or those requiring only 
clerical ability, an upsetting of the industrial balance, 
and a tremendous waste and loss of human energy. 
A final result which naturally follows from the others 
is a widespread distrust of the value of education 
and, consequently, a lukewarm support of it, finan- 
cially and morally, by the community. 

Two things to emphasize with every child from 
his first dawning of understanding are that he should 
be a useful worker and a good citizen. The two things, 
therefore, which should be emphasized in connection 
with the public schools are that they must produce 
efficient workers and enlightened citizens. Those 
aims, however, are to the public rather vague and 
to the child are, of course, meaningless, unless the 
school makes them clear and definite through the 
kind of instruction which it undertakes to give. 
Premising that the school should do what it can to 
keep the child healthy and physically whole, it 



VOCATIONAL TRAINING 91 

should give him, first, as essential tools of social 
living, reading, writing, and number-work, using 
them — since even a child will appreciate their 
importance — as a means of sound and solid edu- 
cational drill. The next things to teach a child are 
how to use his faculties effectively: his eye so that he 
may see with his brain, his ears so that he may hear 
with his mind, his hands so that they may be supple, 
nimble, and variedly efhcient. Such instruction, of 
course, must be unconsciously imparted through sub- 
jects and exercises which call into play those faculties 
and demand this kind of efficiency — observational 
studies, sense training, manual development, etc. 

Education like this, however, can be given ef- 
fectively only through subjects which really interest 
the child; and such interest can be aroused, as 
long centuries of experience have shown, only 
through work of which the child sees the immediate 
aim or the ultimate result. Not that the pupil 
should be entertained or amused: on the contrary, 
he will and should be made to do much harder work 
under the incentive of interest than he would dream 
of doing under the lash of compulsion. But his 
work should be made vital to the pupil by being 
of such a nature that he can see daily, definite re- 
sults or, at least, some clear goal toward which he is 
every week plainly progressing. 



92 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

This requires that every child should be trained 
as an individual, the fundamental defect in public 
education being that it tries to deal with masses of 
children instead of with the individual child. From 
this follow those mechanical methods of schooling 
which stunt or pervert every child who does not 
happen — as very few children do — to fit into the 
pedagogical machine. To secure individual instruc- 
tion for each child it is essential to reduce the num- 
ber of pupils to each teacher. We shall never get a 
public education which amounts to much as a social 
force until we are willing to appropriate sufficient 
money to give at least one teacher to twenty-five 
pupils and to secure teachers, in all cases, competent 
to train the child as an individual instead of as 
part of a huge machine. So long as we try to get a 
public education that can be given by one teacher 
to forty, fifty, or even sixty children at once, the 
moral and economic waste of our present regime 
cannot be repaired. 

Supposing that the public should become suffi- 
ciently aroused to its true interests to appropriate 
such adequate sums and to spend them upon 
thoroughly trained teachers, what are some of the 
ways of giving education, under those conditions, 
a more definite aim? The first business of the 
teacher, thus given time to do so, would Be to study 



VOCATIONAL TRAINING 93 

every child in her class, not as an isolated being or as 
a unit in a school group, but as a member of a family 
and of a neighborhood; for it is from his family and 
his neighborhood that he receives the greater part 
of his general education, and it is as a member of a 
family and as a citizen of some community that his 
education is to be put to use. Having acquainted 
herself v/ith his circumstances, it will be her next 
duty to adapt her teaching, within reasonable limits, 
to each child's needs, strengthening those sides of his 
nature which, because of environment, are weak, 
filling out those deficiencies which his family and 
neighborhood cannot supply, giving him those fun- 
damental forms of training which it is obvious 
he will most need in after life, and leading him, 
as far as may seem possible and best, toward that 
economic path in which he seems most likely to 
succeed. 

The next duty of such a teacher, thus given 
opportunity really to educate, would be to enlist 
all those family and neighborhood forces on her 
side. As a rule, those forces now are either in- 
*different or antagonistic to the school, giving the 
teacher the double burden of counteracting both 
a hostile atmosphere outside the school and a stupid 
and indifferent one within. With an understand- 
ing of the pupil and with a plain determination to 



94 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

help that child to make the most of himself in every 
way, it will be easy enough to make this great inert 
or hostile mass which flows around and too often 
swamps the school into a great flood of enthusiasm 
and activity to lift the teacher and her pupils up to 
the highest level of possible efficiency. 

It is not until the high-school age, however, that 
definite vocational training can properly begin; 
and it is in the high-school period that the greatest 
waste of fine human material now takes place. A 
vast majority of the youth of that age are flung out 
into industrial life without proper preparation for, 
or guidance in, that life; while to the comparatively 
few who enter the secondary school its courses are 
of little or no essential benefit. 

The high schools, as a rule, have thus far wronged 
the public, not simply in giving their best service 
to only a small fraction of the community; they 
have offended even more grievously in belittling 
the real uses and possibilities of secondary edu- 
cation. Ignoring the fact that to nine out of ten 
pupils the high school is the last stage of formal 
training, its courses have been planned, not to 
round out that education, but to leave it unfinished, 
unintelligible, and in large measure barren to those 
graduates who do not go to college. What wonder, 
then, that the attendance upon high schools is, 



VOCATIONAL TRAINING 95 

relatively, so insignificant, and that the average 
parent hesitates to send his children to institutions 
which, as a rule, do little toward making them into 
good citizens and workers, and which do much 
toward leaving them intellectually suspended be- 
tween the unambitious earth of the grammar school 
and the unattainable heaven of the university. 

The first step for public secondary education to 
take, then, if it would provide the completest prepa- 
ration for after-life, is to assert and to secure ab- 
solute independence of the colleges — independence, 
that is, in matters of curriculum. This being done, 
there will be possible in the high school that breadth 
of thought and variety of teaching essential to 
a complete and impartial preparation for all vo- 
cations. Freedom and breadth once secured to 
secondary education, the colleges will quickly adapt 
themselves to the new order, and will establish 
better standards for admission: not arbitrary ones, 
based upon their own supposed needs, but rational 
ones inciting to the best and widest attainments on 
the part of the public school, and so flexible that, 
no matter what may have been his original goal, 
the pupil who has successfully completed any good 
secondary course may, at the last moment, deflect 
himself, without delay or additional labor, into the 
college doors. 



96 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

Agreeing that the public high school should 
preserve equality toward all possible vocations; that 
it should give no advantage or encouragement to 
the future physician over the future shopkeeper, to 
the shopkeeper over the mechanic, or to the me- 
chanic over the professional man, how shall this 
equipoise be maintained? Only by rigorously ex- 
cluding from the secondary course all that is special 
to any profession or peculiar to any trade, and by 
adding every suitable topic and means of teach- 
ing which has general educational value. Such a 
process would not reduce the high school to a single 
uniform course of study; on the contrary, it would 
at once necessitate wide opportunity for selection 
on the part of the pupil; creating, thereby, as an 
inseparable accompaniment of secondary work, an 
extensive system of elective study. 

Judiciously supervised, the permission of choice 
is, in itself, of immense value at the high-school age. 
Moreover, such permission makes possible, with- 
out disobedience to the requirement that special 
vocations shall not be favored, direct vocational 
preparation. For if the secondary course extend 
over at least four years, if it be in the hands of fit 
teachers, the aptitudes of a large proportion of the 
pupils can be readily discerned. The future of 
others v/IU be determined by their family or social 



VOCATIONAL TR.\INING 97 

relations. With both these classes it is practicable 
early to differentiate their work and to lay especial 
stress, without sacrifice of breadth, upon those high- 
school topics which bear most directly upon their 
clearly indicated ultimate vocations. 

Furthermore, elective studies in the high school 
foster the growth and development of individuality 
in its pupils. Our public-school methods have been 
brought, in many instances, to such perfection 
that the pupils are in danger of being destroyed in 
the admired machinery. Some — I fear many — 
schoolrooms are such excellent pieces of clockwork 
that the children have been transformed into clock 
wheels, into mere bits of filed metal, mentally 
useless except in their school places and quite hope- 
less dunces if they refuse to permit themselves to 
be filed at all! Such a result is a mockery of edu- 
cation, as little related to human needs and pur- 
poses as is a wax automaton to a flesh-and-blood 
man. Almost better no teaching than such saw- 
dust stuff as this! The soul of a man is bound up 
in his individuality; and were we dealing with 
primary education it would be easy to grow hot over 
a system that puts fifty or even sixty of these in- 
dividual souls into the keeping of a single teacher 
who, in order to get through her day's work at all, 
must grind and file and squeeze these little in- 



98 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

dividualities into a dulling and deadening uni- 
formity. 

Fortunately, or unfortunately, those who get as 
far as the high school are so few in number that, as 
a rule, the proportion of pupils to teachers is much 
smaller than in the lower schools, and individuality 
can receive some thought and consideration. But 
there, again, system, that delight of the pedagogue, 
would, with increasing numbers, assume control 
were it not that, coincident with an increase in 
attendance, is growing up an understanding of and 
a belief in choice of studies. The elective prin- 
ciple in secondary education, rightly developed and 
v/isely extended, will do much to hasten the coming 
of that ideal time when the man and his vocation 
will be in closer harmony, for it will promote those 
things which put a man in sympathy with his voca- 
tion, impel him to seek a congenial work in life, and 
give him strength to make that work an expression, 
as all good work should be, of himself. It will pro- 
mote, in short, his individuality. 

There are three great classes of workers to whom 
a high-school course not only is possible but should 
be made equally beneficial: the professional class, 
the commercial class, the industrial class. It might 
be profitable to consider how perfectly the usual 
secondary course meets the needs of professional 



VOCATIONAL TRAINING 99 

preparation; but since, as has been shown, the 
strength of the ordinary high-school curriculum — 
whether well or ill planned — is now expended upon 
preparation for the professions, that minority of 
persons may be passed by, in order to consider the 
vocational training provided by the secondary 
school for that immense majority of skilled workers, 
the followers of commerce and the industrial arts. 
The question is best approached from the other 
direction, by inquiring what are the qualities that 
the merchant, the manufacturer, the railroad 
official, the foreman of a shop, seek in boys who 
come into their employ to earn eventual promotion 
to positions of responsibility. They do not demand 
technical knowledge; that is to be gained only by 
experience behind the counter, at the desk, upon 
the road, with the machine or tool. Such technical 
knowledge cannot be given — ought not to be given 
if it could — in the school; scarcely can it be im- 
parted in any establishment other than that to 
which the boy is to be attached, so peculiar to each 
office or shop is the skill required to sell its goods, 
to keep its books, to handle its machinery. In that 
direction, therefore, the 'prentice mind is preferably 
smoothed wax whereon the better to Impress the 
methods, the ideas, the atmosphere individual to 
each establishment. 



loo NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

Without demanding specialized knowledge, there- 
fore, there are many things which the employer of a 
high-school graduate does want very much; and be- 
cause he cannot often secure them he complains 
loudly of education. Not seldom he maintains that 
the less schooling an apprentice has the better. 
Truly, as regards schooling of a certain kind he is 
not far wrong. There is a sort of teaching which 
destroys the mother-wit and dulls the ambition of 
the brightest and most eager boy; though, happily, 
schools of that ill character are increasingly more rare. 

What are these qualities which every employer of 
unskilled boy-power — to be transformed along cer- 
tain lines into skilled man-power — wants .^ First: 
good morals. The lad must be trustworthy, honest, 
truth-telling, not easily tempted, sturdy to with- 
stand the moral ordeal which life holds for every one. 

Secondly: good health. The teaching and train- 
ing which, whether he will or not, the employer 
must give to his employees is, from his standpoint, 
an Investment of capital; and he is bound to secure 
such sound flesh-and-blood Into which to put this 
capital that there will be little risk of physical 
bankruptcy, just as he and his employee begin to 
reap, from the technical knowledge and proved 
faithfulness of the latter, large dividends upon the 
original investment. 



VOCATIONAL TRAINING loi 

Thirdly: gumption. No better than this homely 
word can be found to express that combination of 
alertness, keen observation, ready wit, power to 
seize opportunities and to surmount difficulties, 
which, next to good health and morals, is most 
essential to a man's success. 

Fourthly: power of concentration. That is, abil- 
ity to work hard and long and intensely, shutting 
out all other thoughts and interests and reaching 
by the quickest path the largest measure of result. 

Fifthly: manual power. Not mere skill in hand- 
work, but excellence in "handiness." This im- 
plies an understanding between the brain and hand 
so perfect that, no matter how new or seemingly 
difficult the manual task, it is no sooner understood 
by the mind than the willing muscles instantly 
respond. 

Finally, the employer, especially in commercial 
pursuits, asks, almost despairingly, that the ap- 
prentice shall have familiarity with and power over 
the tools of social communication: over reading, 
writing, spelling, speech, composition, expression, 
and the use of numbers. How simple this require- 
ment! Yet how rare the secondary, or even the col- 
lege, graduate who can so wield the tool of writing 
that what he writes is both mechanically legible 
and handsome and intellectually clear and forcible; 



I02 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

who has such command over the tool of speech 
that he does not offend by errors, does not mislead 
others, does not misrepresent himself; who so ap- 
perceives the printed word that it is a real inter- 
preter, not a barrier, between his understanding and 
the writer's thought; who can use the tool of num- 
bers rapidly, easily, and v/ithout question of the 
result. 

Given a boy with good morals and sound health, 
who can read understandingly, speak clearly, write 
legibly, grammatically and forcefully, and cipher 
correctly; let him have, besides, tact (which comes 
by nature), gumption, handiness, and the power of 
working both hard and effectively — the business 
and industrial world is his to choose from, for his 
worth will have but few competitors. 

Thorough command of these three R's is secured 
to the pupil only by eternal vigilance. No oc- 
casional practise of them will at all suffice. Alike 
in the secondary and in the elementary school, 
during every moment of the sessions, writing, spell- 
ing, speaking, composition, expression, ciphering 
must be under sleepless inspection. Every exercise, 
every recitation, every laboratory report should be 
a double test: of the pupil's knowledge of the topic 
itself, of his skill with the tools by which he makes 
that knowledge evident. Hardly a skilled career 



VOCATIONAL TRAINING 103 

can be imagined in which such early vigilance will 
not be repaid a thousandfold. 

Rightly or wrongly, the world pays immense re- 
gard to the forms of things. Call this attitude, if 
you please, superficial, rail at form as a thing un- 
essential to true worth and usefulness, the fact re- 
mains that, as a rule, it is the way in which a man 
brings himself before the world quite as much as 
what he brings that assures his success. Man- 
ners do make the man, because they are the only 
sign visible to the world of the inward worth. Let 
the boy or girl possess every virtue and much 
knowledge, the way of advancement will be difficult 
or impossible unless he or she can transmute those 
virtues and that knowledge into the only current 
coin of social intercourse, the coin of ready and 
excellent speech and writing, the coin of absolute 
command of those human tools with which alone 
the elaborate fabric of civilization has been con- 
structed and can be carried higher. 

Concentration, the power of hard and effective 
work, is a habit that can be formed only in youth. 
Most high schools are much too lenient in this 
matter of concentration. Their sessions are too 
short, thoroughness in everything that the pupil 
does is not sufficiently insisted upon, the proportion 
of women teachers (for boys) is too large, manly 



104 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

standards are not strongly enough maintained, and 
the study-time is not so sharply supervised as are 
the recitation periods. If a boy at fourteen seeks 
employment, he must, fortunately for him, work 
hard for many hours a day. If he remains in the 
high school until his eighteenth year, long hours of 
labor are still in store for him. What an immense 
advantage for that boy if those four intervening 
years could be spent in laborious and exacting 
exercises performed, not for an indifferent em- 
ployer, but under the wise and discriminating su- 
pervision of trained teachers. Seven hours a day 
during five days a week and at least three hours on 
Saturday would not be too many for the high- 
school pupil: provided, of course, that these ex- 
tended sessions were not spent in a treadmill of 
brain worry, but were properly divided among 
recitations, laboratory work, manual and vocational 
training, drawing, and gymnastics, and that during 
these sessions, not afterward, the greater part of 
the pupil's studying should be done. The worst, 
and one of the commonest, of habits is that of 
dawdling. Few things contribute more to foster 
it than home study, where the average boy or girl, 
without method or definiteness, with no acquired 
power of concentration, only half understanding and 
totally indifferent, yawns the evening away in an 



VOCATIONAL TRAINING 105 

attempt to learn lessons which, under intelligent 
supervision, might be acquired, and acquired pleas- 
urably, within an hour. 

Half the task of the schools should be to teach 
youth how to learn; for the popular ignorance and 
indifference regarding social and political questions 
vital to the Republic are due, in great measure, to 
the fact that the people, at school, have never 
learned how to bring their minds to bear upon new 
problems. Any necessity of thought or of in- 
ductive reasoning fills them with dismay. If the 
scope of the high school could be so broadened as 
to attract a far larger proportion of youth, if its 
day could be lengthened and filled with a variety 
of systematic and carefully correlated exercises 
tending to develop, among other things, the power 
of concentration, the vocations would find a new 
race seeking admission to them, a race able to develop 
old and to acquire new ideas, a race not only know- 
ing how to work, but not afraid to work, a race 
regarding whom no employer would think of assert- 
ing that it had been spoiled by schooling. 

Unhappily, one cannot establish courses in gump- 
tion, but one can put into the high school many 
subjects that promote its growth. Foremost among 
these will be mathematics, the sciences, and sound 
manual training: anything, indeed, suited to high- 



io6 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

school age, which compels a youth to do his own 
studying and thinking and to use, In the highest pos- 
sible measure, the inductive method. How com- 
pletely the stereotyped secondary course of but 
a few years ago failed to promote sharpness of the 
faculties, exactness of observation, quickness of 
thought, readiness of inference! Yet what voca- 
tion in these electric days does not demand, above 
all else, those qualities? 

Manual power, handiness, arises from the same 
sources and methods of teaching as does gump- 
tion, for the two are in close relation. The stupid, 
unalert mind and the awkward hand have their 
root equally in a sluggish nervous system, un- 
aroused interest, unstirred ambition. Find studies 
that will supply these deficiencies and the boy will 
be transformed. Some pupils will need one stimu- 
lus, some another; but the readiest way to find what 
is required is through the laboratory and the work- 
shop, where, as In no other place, the wise teacher 
can read the Inmost workings of the pupil's nature 
and determine, almost without fail, what stimulus 
must be supplied to arouse the dormant faculties. 

Good health may not lend itself to examination 
by the colleges; yet the high-school authorities 
have no greater duty than to preserve and foster it. 
However wicked it may seem to spend the people's 



VOCATIONAL TRAINING 107 

money upon gymnasiums rather than upon "book- 
learning,'' their taxes cannot be put at any more 
profitable usury. The money loss to the country 
through preventable illness, untimely death, and 
disease-induced crime is appalling. Even greater, 
if possible, is the loss through the mental and physi- 
cal inefficiency of workers kept in a low state of 
health by bad food, lack of proper exercise, and 
other non-hygienic conditions. Therefore, not only 
should gymnastic exercise be made as serious as any 
other study of the high school; the sound, sensible, 
and complete teaching and practice of hygiene 
should extend throughout the course. No foolish 
maundering about alcohol and tobacco, but a 
thorough training in right physical living that will 
fortify against intemperance of every kind. 

With high-school courses aiming to preserve sound 
bodies, to develop quickness of observation, clear- 
ness of thought, readiness of reasoning; with its 
lengthened day distributed judiciously over a wide 
range of mental, manual, and gymnastic exercises; 
with the powers of its pupils thus educated in the 
highest degree — self-understanding, self-respect, 
self-government, except in born degenerates, will 
follow almost as a matter of course. And upon 
these depend good morals. Secure, therefore, a 
rational, flexible, real secondary education main- 



loS NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

tained by professional, not amateur, teachers of the 
highest personal ideals, and the good morals of those 
who receive it will be practically assured. Without 
this, or, indeed, with it, didactic morality is wholly 
ineffectual. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE PRESSING NEED FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 

FOR present purposes industrial education may 
be divided into (i) technological education, 
through vrhich, after graduation from a 
secondary school or college, a youth is prepared 
for a profession other than that of divinity or 
law; (2) technical education, by which is meant 
that special training through which a youth is fitted 
to become a foreman, manager or superintendent 
of a particular industry or group of industries; (3) 
trade education, through which a boy or girl is 
prepared to enter an industry or group of industries 
at a stage not far below that of journeyman; and 
(4) manual training, under which are included those 
school exercises that train the hands — and also the 
eye — not primarily for the industrial but mainly 
for the educational result. Making a cleavage in 
the other plane, all these types of education divide 
themselves, broadly, into day schools, night schools, 
and part-time schools: into schools where the pupIFs 
first business is education; into those which are 

109 



no NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

merely supplementary to the daily, gainful occupa- 
tion; and into those where the vocation and the 
school work go forward hand in hand. Additional 
to these and rivaling, in point of numbers, all the 
others put together, are the correspondence schools, 
which at least show how great must be the need of 
and the desire for technical training since so many 
tens of thousands of men and women will pay con- 
siderable sums to secure instruction through the 
unsatisfactory medium of the post-ofhce. We may, 
however, ignore these correspondence schools, for 
confessedly they occupy only a temporary void 
which must eventually be filled by regular school 
agencies. We may neglect, also, the higher insti- 
tutions, since the education given by such colleges 
is professional rather than merely technical. 

Let us then consider the opportunities for true 
industrial education, under the direction of a teacher 
and in buildings designed for school purposes, for 
boys and girls from ten to twenty years of age. I 
set this somewhat narrow limit because, despite the 
fact that apprenticeship is substantially dead, there 
is still a good deal of apprentice-teaching of one 
kind and another, in a wide range of trades and 
industries and under every sort of good and bad 
condition. These opportunities within the indus- 
tries are, however, so scattered, so incomplete, in 



NEED FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION iii 

many cases still so much in the experimental stage, 
that it would hardly be worth while, even were it 
possible, to consider and compare them. 

Turning first to technical education proper, we 
find the manufacturing regions rich in opportunities 
for youth to fit themselves for executive positions 
in the trades and industries, to fit themselves, that 
is, for the duties of foreman, superintendent, etc., 
from which positions it is easy, in this country, to 
rise into industrial and economic power. The fellow 
who wants to get on in the world appeals strongly to 
all Americans and especially to those of wealth who 
are themselves self-made men. Therefore we find 
in almost every city, day schools, night schools, 
''continuation" schools, special classes, lectures, 
model shops and museums giving opportunity for a 
youth who is or has been industrially employed to 
fit himself for positions of greater scope and respon- 
sibility. This is the origin of those endowed in- 
stitutions of which the Cooper Union in New York, 
the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the Drexel Institute 
in Philadelphia, and the Lowell Free School for 
Industrial Foremen in Boston are typical examples. 
Most of such institutions conduct day classes, with 
definite curricula; but the bulk of their instruction 
is given in evening classes crowded with eager 
students who, notwithstanding they have already 



112 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

performed a hard day's work, come evening after 
evening, applying themselves with that zeal and 
thoroughness which only an immediate and pressing 
motive can induce. 

Besides these, we have such classes as those of 
the Young Men's Christian Association, and of 
various other semi-philanthropic agencies — secular, 
religious, and semi-religious — which use technical 
education primarily to uplift their young men and 
women, but also as a means of attaching them to the 
institutions of which this work is but one of the 
activities. And, finally, we have a few institutions, 
like the Williamson School, in the suburbs of Phila- 
delphia, which take possession of the young man 
for some years and give him a thorough training, 
mentally and technically, for foremanship in a trade, 
making him work out with his own hands substan- 
tially every type of problem, whether in building, 
masonry, ironwork, plumbing, electricity or mech- 
anism, which is likely ever to be presented to him. 

Speaking generally, all such auxiliary modes of 
education give a good body of academic training 
specialized more or less to meet the needs of in- 
dustrial occupations, and they provide, beyond that, 
such technical training in physics, chemistry, draw- 
ing, mechanics, architecture, etc., as will enable the 
graduate to nil an executive position, of greater or 



NEED FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 113 

less responsibility, in one or more of the many and 
rapidly multiplying trades, industries, and technical 
professions. Most of them give, moreover, such 
preliminary instruction as seems feasible for the 
various lines of mercantile employment. The 
courses and the efficiency of these many agencies 
differ exceedingly; but the aim of all of them is to 
ascertain the intellectual and technical demands for 
advancement and eventual leadership in the several 
industries and to encourage youth employed in those 
or in other occupations to prepare themselves to 
fulfil them. 

Technological schools and technical schools, how- 
ever, exist superlatively, if not solely, for training 
the officers of the industrial army. In both types 
there is given every opportunity for young men and 
women of energy, industry, and determination to 
get an education and to make that education the 
stepping-stone to the highest industrial and intel- 
lectual achievement. And, as has already been said, 
the giving of this opportunity so appeals to us 
Americans that we need never fear a dearth of in- 
stitutions in which every youth who wants to do so 
may secure — even though it be through much 
hardship and privation — an education for leader- 
ship in the industrial army. 

But what of the rank and file of that enormous 



114 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

industrial host? It was the royal army of Hawaii, 
I believe, that boasted hundreds of officers and not 
a single private; but are we not, also, paying too 
much attention to the training of officers, too little 
to the men and women who do the fighting in this 
ceaseless struggle to subdue nature to the service 
of mankind? To secure and maintain industrial 
power, we need not more and better officers, we 
need not more and better machinery, we need higher 
skilled and better disciplined privates behind those 
tools and machines. To-day, it seems to me, we 
find ourselves confronted with the evil results of 
this over-concern for the development of the in- 
dustrial superstructure, of this under-attention to 
the strengthening of the foundations upon which 
that structure has to rest. We find everywhere, 
that is, a dearth of men of skill, men who think 
about their work, men who take pride in a good job, 
men who are striving, as are the German workmen, 
to put the entire nation in the industrial forefront. 
The industrial leaders of Germany say — and I 
think with reason — that they have no fear of our 
competition in manufactures, so many years behind 
are we in the training for his work of the average 
workingman. Yet in native ingenuity we are ahead 
of the Germans, while in highly educated industrial 
executives we are fast overtaking her. 



NEED FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 115 

Our backwardness — which must be patent to 
every one who has to do with industries — is partly 
due, of course, to the fact that we have only lately 
entered the world's markets and realized the demands 
made by international competition. It is due, how- 
ever, in far greater measure to what seem to me 
false notions respecting education. We have been 
so fearful lest we should not give every boy and girl 
an equal chance that we have ended by cheating a 
great proportion of them out of any chance what- 
ever. We have been so afraid of establishing a 
caste system that we have developed the most 
wretched caste of all, a caste of men and women with 
no definite trade or occupation and with no chance 
to acquire one. 

On the ground that all children should have equal 
opportunity, we have established an elementary 
school course practically the same for every pupil 
whether he is to go out as a day laborer at fourteen 
or is eventually to graduate from a professional 
school at twenty-five. More than this, the only 
test of this elementary education lies in examina- 
tions which, however remote from the college, are 
really dictated indirectly by the university's de- 
mands. The result is that, instead of giving a 
democratic training, we really have established a 
very special kind of education which, if it ceases — 



ii6 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

as for most children it does — at fourteen, fits a 
child only (and that most imperfectly) for some 
clerical vocation. In addition to thus giving in the 
elementary public schools what is actually a limited 
class education, we also create the mischievous im- 
pression that to be honorable and genteel one must 
work with the head, rather than with the hands, 
thus desperately overcrowding the most poorly paid 
occupations while failing to supply in any adequate 
measure those skilled trades which offer a com- 
paratively high reward. Furthermore, though seek- 
ing to avoid caste distinctions, we actually create 
a real proletariat through economic conditions 
which make it impossible for the vast majority of 
boys and girls to go to school after the fourteenth 
year, and thus to take advantage of the special 
opportunities which are provided, at public cost, 
for those children whose economic status does per- 
mit of their attending the high school. 

It may be said in answer that, in ever-increasing 
measure, we arc providing manual training in the 
schools. Did this training reach, as it does not, 
any more than a small fraction of the children 
who need industrial development, it still has, con- 
fessedly, serious deficiencies as a form of technical 
training. Founded, as it generally is, upon the 
so-called Russian system, it is limited in scope and 



NEED FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 117 

hangs in pedagogical air between unrelated earlier 
studies and an unconnected later vocation. Being 
devised for classes rather than for the individual, 
it allows, on the one hand, little play for individual- 
ity, and, on the other, almost none of that working 
together which is fundamental to a right industrial 
spirit. Worst of all, it repudiates economic utility 
and — with great loss to the pupil — emphasizes 
the fact that its purpose is educational, not indus- 
trial. Regarded simply from the pedagogical stand- 
point, manual training should begin the moment a 
child enters school and should progress by rational 
stages to a shop-work which, while being exact 
and thorough, should permit of spontaneity and 
inventiveness, should emphasize group work and 
the constructional side and, above all, whether or 
not the pupil is to go into industrial life, should 
connect itself in the closest possible way with the 
industries of the neighborhood and of the city or 
town wherein the child resides. Far more should 
manual training do these things from the industrial 
standpoint; and because it does not, it cannot yet 
be considered an important factor in solving this 
pressing problem of technical training for the rank 
and file. 

The first thing to be done, it seems to me, is 
frankly to acknowledge that an overwhelming 



ii8 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

majority of public-school children are obliged, by- 
unchangeable economic necessity, to leave school at 
fourteen — or as early as the law allows — and to 
enter, for the rest of their lives, some industrial 
occupation. That being so, it is the duty of the 
community to fit them for that inevitable vocation 
just as the college and school of technology fit for 
the higher vocations, not by teaching the knacks 
and tricks of any special trade, but by training 
those senses, aptitudes, and general powers which 
lie at the foundation of industrial efficiency. There 
are certain fundamental studies which every child 
must, of course, take up. There are, moreover, 
certain virtues, such as honesty, diligence, patriot- 
ism, which every school should endeavor to instil. 
But in addition to those, the course of every ele- 
mentary school should develop in the highest degree 
possible to every child his powers of seeing clearly, 
hearing intelligently, and using his hands skilfully, 
and should teach him how to work. Moreover, 
school courses should be so elastic and adaptable to 
the individual as to meet the special requirements 
of the neighborhood or of the town in which the 
school is placed, and to give every child at least the 
root principles of that trade in which he is most 
likely to find ready and profitable employment. 
Even this, however, would meet in but very small 



NEED FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 119 

degree the pressing needs of the industrial situation. 
There should further be provided on a large and 
generous scale, in both the mechanic and agricultural 
arts, not only a definite industrial training for the 
young men and women of push and ambition who 
seek the higher places, but also a real bread and- 
butter education for the infinitely greater number 
who desire, of course, a decent wage and a steady 
job, but who have neither the brains nor the am- 
bition to take advantage of the opportunities which, 
as I have tried to show, are being provided with 
perhaps needless liberality. I may best indicate 
the general type of opportunity which these over- 
whelming numbers of our boys and girls ought to 
have by describing briefly two schools: the Man- 
hattan Trade School for Girls and the Baron de 
Hirsch Trade School, both in New York City. 

The first-named school, troubling itself little 
about theories of a rounded education or of an out- 
raged democracy, undertook to meet a definite con- 
dition: that of girls leaving school at fourteen unable 
to get a living wage, and finding it almost impossible 
to fit themselves to earn that wage, a condition even 
more serious in its moral than in its economic 
aspects. The school meets the problem by finding 
out what industrial opportunities there are for 
trained girls of fifteen or sixteen and by educating 



I20 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

those girls strictly and solely to meet those oppor- 
tunities. The pupils receive, of course, some train- 
ing in writing, number work, etc., but even that is 
designed for business; while no girl is taught the 
whole of a trade in all its developments and rami- 
fications. She is prepared in only so much of it as a 
girl of sixteen can enter, it being clear that if she once 
gets a foothold as a trained assistant, she can, if she 
will, rise by industry to the highest positions which 
that trade may oifer. In millinery, for example, 
this school wastes no time in teaching a child to trim 
hats, for there is no possibility of her doing that kind 
of work for a number of years. In dressmaking, 
again, the school trains neither fitters nor finishers, 
for such positions are out of the reach of girls of 
sixteen; while there is a strong and steady dem.and 
for such girls in those simple branches of dressmaking 
in which this school gives the pupils a thorough and 
practical training under the supervision of genuine 
forewomen and under the very best conditions of the 
actual shop. The result is that after a compara- 
tively short time (varying, of course, with the in- 
dividual) the girl is in demand at five dollars a week 
(without the training she could command not over 
three dollars) and rapidly rises to a much higher 
rate of pay. Boston has a similar Trade School for 
Girls on Massachusetts Avenue. . 



NEED FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 121 

The Baron de Hirsch Trade School takes Russian 
Jews at sixteen or seventeen — pedlers, errand 
boys, casual workers of all kinds — and in five and 
a half months of hard training under shop conditions 
fits them to be helpers in the carpentering, metal 
working, plumbing, and other trades at an average 
wage, immediately upon graduation, of over seven 
dollars per week, rising rapidly to two and three 
times that sum. Without training, these boys would 
hardly earn five dollars a week and would have, more- 
over, no outlook except to be always "casuals." 

Facing, as such schools as these have done, facts 
and not theories, we must, it seems to me, find some 
way of establishing, on a comprehensive scale, real 
trade schools which shall take substantially every 
child whom necessity drives into work at the end of 
the legal age and fit him for some occupation for 
which he is suited and in which there is an economic 
demand. Whether or not this shall be done at 
public cost, it is not yet time to say, though I be- 
lieve that it would be more just to spend the common 
revenues in this way than upon high-school pupils 
whose parents are perfectly able to pay a tuition 
fee. But for the starting of such schools there is an 
abundance of private funds, provided the givers 
or the trustees can be made to see that the need for 
training the rank and file is so much greater than for 



122 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

developing officers in the industrial army. The 
chief obstacles are not, however, financial; they are 
those of prejudice: the prejudice of the educator 
who sees danger to the ancient theories of *^ culture," 
*^ breadth" and all their satellites; the prejudice of 
the citizen who fears the development of caste and 
the destruction of the sacred first clause of the Dec- 
laration; and the prejudice of the labor organiza- 
tions, who cannot yet be made to understand that 
the good of one worker is the good of the whole, and 
that the greatest enemy to Labor is the industrial 
ignorance of its rank and file. 

Therefore, the most pressing business of education, 
it seems to me, is to educate away these diverse and 
deep-seated prejudices. It must persuade its own 
followers that the only truly educated man is he 
who has been developed to his fullest powers, and 
that those powers can be best matured by activities 
related to the child's present life and future in- 
terests. It must persuade the public that to develop 
a good citizen one must first make a good earner, 
and that no man is industrially efficient whose train- 
ing for making a living has been left wholly to chance. 
It must persuade — for it is impossible to defy — 
the labor unions that just as educated physicians, 
lawyers, and engineers have raised not only the 
standing but also the standards of compensation in 



NEED FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 123 

those professions, so training in the industries will 
elevate not only the quality but also the value of 
the skilled laborer's work. There is at present so 
much loss and waste, and therefore so much risk 
in all industry through ignorance and lack of skill, 
that capital has to insure itself by taking a larger 
profit (when there is one) than, under the immensely 
improved conditions which would follow a wide- 
spread trade education, it would need, or would be 
permitted, to receive. 

Meeting the pupil, then, at the end of the legal 
school age, and finding him, it is to be hoped, with 
senses and understanding already rightly educated 
by a comprehensive general and judicious special 
training, the technical school of the future, in close 
working cooperation with the manufacturers, will 
give those two or three years up to seventeen — now 
of little value industrially but of immense impor- 
tance morally — to the work of preparing that pupil 
for some definite trade, industry or occupation. In 
doing this it will have regard to the native capacity 
of the child, to the circumstances in which he is 
placed, and to the industrial needs of his town or 
neighborhood. Whether or not the graduate from 
such a school follows the line of his training is of 
little consequence; the very fact that he has a trade 
gives him a power and manliness unknown to the 



124 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

helpless "casual'* whom, under present methods, 
the school now sets adrift at fourteen. And that 
he has a trade by no means fetters him to a special 
industry or to any industrial stratum; if he has 
ability and push he will rise and find his true voca- 
tion just as rapidly as he can now progress with an 
alleged all-round education. Indeed, he will go for- 
ward far more easily, for he will be able, through 
the fact of having a trade, to secure that first foot- 
hold which, with "self-made" men, is the most 
difficult and disheartening step. The effect of such 
technical schools upon the general welfare of the 
community: the direct eflfect in increasing industrial 
efficiency and prosperity and the indirect influence 
in diminishing the number of incompetents, unfor- 
tunates, and other social wrecks and burdens, will be, 
unquestionably, so great as literally to re-form our 
industrial and social structure; while their reactive 
effect upon elementary education in giving its proc- 
esses a clear aim, thus invigorating and vitalizing 
them through and through, will be no less salutary. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE DEMANDS OF BUSINESS 

IN THE early years of the present century, Prince 
Henry of Prussia visited the United States as 
the personal representative of the German 
Emperor. As is our habit with royalty, our adula- 
tions were even deeper and sillier than in countries 
where they are used to kings. The culmination of 
our foolishness was in a dinner given to him in New 
York, to which were invited only the so-called 
"Captains of Industry." These were about a 
hundred in number and included steel, oil, and rail- 
way magnates, insurance company presidents, and 
other millionaires and multi-millionaires. 

This bringing of the lions together for exhibition 
to the royal representative of Germany was harmless 
in itself; the mischief came through the newspapers 
and magazines which for weeks and months there- 
after were filled with glorifications of these wonder- 
ful leaders, with implications that their ability was 
of superhuman character, and with exhortations to 
young men to make their lives worthy to be men- 

125 



126 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

tioned In the same category with those of the em- 
perors of modern life. 

Within less than a year, however, the bubble of 
money worship burst. The son of a dead captain 
fell foul of some of the living captains, and from one 
revelation to another the sickening story went on 
of conspiracy, cheating, misuse of funds, and common 
thievery, through which not a few of these magnates 
had risen to their financial eminence. It was mainly 
a story of bribery of legislation, of employment of 
trust funds for private speculation, of building up 
private fortunes through the wholesale corruption 
of public morals. The worst of it, however, was 
this : that although many newspaper representatives, 
and therefore many newspaper editors, had been 
familiar with the main facts of this rottenness for 
twenty years, they had all joined in the adulation 
of these Captains of Industry and in the exhortations 
to young men to take these magnates as models for 
a really noteworthy career. Had the balloon not 
burst, the painting of black as white would seemingly 
have gone on indefinitely. 

That period of moral readjustment was a crucial 
one in the history of the United States, in com- 
parison with which other crises, like those of the 
Revolution, the adoption of the Constitution, and the 
election of i860, are comparatively small. Had the 



THE DEMANDS OF BUSINESS 127 

Captains-of-Industry bubble not been pricked, had 
those exalted thieves been worshipped for a few 
years longer, such corruption would have been in- 
stilled into the body politic, such widespread con- 
fusion of right and wrong would have ensued, that 
the country would almost certainly have gone, like 
perverted Rome, to a deserved decay. Fortunately 
the corruptors of public morals quarreled, the sound 
ethical sense of the people revolted at the exposed 
financial nastiness, and the federal and state govern- 
ments lent powerful aid in bringing back the true 
meanings of commercial right and wrong. Mr. 
Roosevelt, like all ardent and impulsive men, made 
not a few mistakes; but this country owes him an 
everlasting debt for his downrightness of speech and 
action at that critical time. 

The business world, since the life insurance cata- 
clysm, is not, of course, a community of saints. It is 
still an aggregation of men, with all the faults and 
weaknesses of human nature. But, since the down- 
fall of the Captains-of-Industry worship, the moral 
vision of the so-called man-in-the-street has been 
changed and clarified. There is still plenty of 
cheating, stealing, falsifying, and "knifing" (to use 
an expressive word) in business, but these things are 
no longer legitimate and praiseworthy. There has 
come back into the commercial world the old-time 



128 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

respect for sound industry and solid worth; there has 
been restored a genuine belief that "honesty is the 
best policy"; and it is now possible to tell a young 
man, without an ironical wink, that the surest road 
to abiding success is through hard work and unfalter- 
ing probity. Tinsel and paste are still admired and 
run after in the business, as in the marriage market; 
but they are no longer accepted, in the long run, as 
a substitute for the genuine article. 

Every profession, even the ministry, is infested 
with rogues and swindlers; and, in these better days, 
if business seems still to show more than its share, it 
is largely because the opportunities are greater, the 
total number in the profession is larger, and because 
money evils are easier to see. Since these things 
touch one's pocket rather than one's mind or soul, 
they get talked about to a degree in which no similar 
wickedness, even in the clerical profession, reaches 
the public ear. 

The learned professions, however, are rapidly 
raising their standards and increasing their moral 
demands. The profession of business, no less, must 
not only elevate its ideals, it must hold its members 
to stricter moral account if it is to keep pace with 
the progress of the world. 

Were one attempting a counsel of perfection, he 
would doubtless advocate, as an ideal preparation 



THE DEMANDS OF BUSINESS 129 

for business, two years of college, then one or two 
years of hard work in some manufacturing or mer- 
cantile establishment, then a return for graduation 
(with carefully chosen specialties) at college, then 
two years in that professional school of science, law, 
or commerce which bears most closely upon the 
chosen business, and finally at least one year's travel 
through the United States and in countries abroad. 
To most young men this long program is, of course, 
impossible; and with many it might have the dis- 
astrous result seen in the case of some medical 
students, who spend so much time in the schools 
and hospitals that when finally, at about thirty years 
of age, they are ready to practise, they find that the 
spring and ambition of youth are practically gone 
and, with them, all hope of a great professional 
career. 

Let us limit ourselves, then, to that still com- 
paratively very small class of men who can spend 
four years at college in preparation for a business life. 
And let us start out with the conviction that unless 
he absolutely idles away those four years, the youth 
who takes a college course thereby secures an intel- 
lectual and moral advantage over those who go 
directly into business from the elementary or 
secondary school, which the latter can seldom, if 
ever, overcome. For a college education means, or 



I30 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

should mean, culture, and culture is the cream of 
life, is the fruit of the tree, is the supreme end and 
test of civilization. Because, however, culture has 
been so much prated about by intellectual snobs, 
because, in homely phrase, it has been thought to be 
related more to the dessert than to the solid bread 
and meat of life, it has acquired rather an ill name, 
a reputation not improved by newspaper jokes over 
Matthew Arnold's sugar-candy phrase of "sweetness 
and light." But, far from being a frill and luxury 
of life, culture is one of the first essentials to real 
success and, in its true meaning, not in the restricted 
sense of dilettantism to which we too often limit it, 
the only really successful man is he who possesses 
culture. For to have true culture means that a man 
has a mind furnished with many things beyond and 
above the matters which concern his livelihood; that 
he has breadth of view, knowledge of the world, skill 
in dealing with men, ability to foresee and intelli- 
gence to grapple with the complex problems which 
meet one every day. This true culture the college 
graduate should have, and, having it, he possesses 
a lifelong advantage which nothing can take away. 
College men who are going into business may be 
roughly divided into two classes : those who, by early 
definition of choice or by family opportunity, are 
looking forward to some particular occupation, and 



THE DEMANDS OF BUSINESS 131 

those who are going into ^^just business,'^ this latter 
class being wholly at sea as to whether that business 
is to be manufacturing, transportation, or whole- 
sale or retail trade. Each should acquire, as a 
fundamental tool, a good working knowledge of the 
principles of mercantile exchange, of what may be 
called the alphabet of business — familiarity, that is, 
with the essentials of accounting, with the nature of 
checks, notes, stocks, bonds, etc., and with the 
writing of a business letter couched in the phraseology 
of the work-a-day world. There is an astounding 
ignorance on the part of the average college graduate 
regarding these simple questions, and to that ig- 
norance is due in no small degree the widespread 
impression that a college career is of little use in 
mercantile affairs. Just as bad spelling makes an 
unfavorable impression far in excess of its real 
importance, so this type of ignorance produces 
an effect upon employers way beyond its actual 
significance. 

Secondly, the young business man must be both 
able and willing to do a lot of hard work, not by occa- 
sional spurts of energy, but of the steady, grinding 
kind through which alone he can master the infinite 
details of whatever industry he may enter, can over- 
come the daily difficulties and discouragements which 
he is sure to meet, and can rise above the clerical 



^ 132 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

rank and file into those positions of responsibility 
wherein alone he can have a fair chance to show what 
he is able to do. 

In order, however, to do the kind of steady, hard 
labor which a successful career demands, a young 
man must possess a body which is a well-tempered 
and well-trained machine. The essential thing, 
therefore, is to conserve his health, not undermining 
it by bad eating, bad air, lack of exercise, smoking, 
drinking, and other excesses; not jeopardizing it by 
overexertion in either study or athletics; and not 
making too frequent drafts, for social pleasures, upon 
the great reserve fund which, at college age, most 
persons have. On the other hand, he must de- 
liberately train body and mind, in the exceptional 
opportunity offered by the college environment, to 
work together, so that each shall help the other in 
keeping sound, in becoming efficient, and in accom- 
plishing an enormous amount of really telling work. 

Beyond the ability to perform hard work, however, 
there should be the constant readiness and willing- 
ness to do it; and one of the genuine grievances of 
the business world against the college is that so many 
of its graduates, likely in body and in brain, amount 
to nothing because, in the college course, they have 
got into the habit of doing just as little as possible, 
instead of into the habit of doing just as much as 



THE DEMANDS OF BUSINESS 133 

possible. The employer wants men coming from 
college to be in that state of mind where they abhor 
idleness, regard waste of time as a good deal worse 
than waste of money, and look upon promptness, 
efficiency, accuracy, and thoroughness as essential 
to everything they undertake. 

Thirdly, the young business man should have 
good judgment (so much, that is, as is possible with- 
out wide experience of men and affairs), quickness of 
apprehension, fertility of resource, readiness to 
adapt himself to new conditions, and willingness to 
learn. He should have, in short, those qualifications 
which are admirably summed up in the good Yankee 
word *' gumption." Hard work alone will seldom 
achieve success beyond that of the faithful, plodding 
understrapper. "Slickness" (to use another ex- 
pressive Yankee word), if it achieve apparent success, 
does so at the sacrifice of everything else. But 
*' gumption" and all that it implies, when combined 
with the spirit of honesty and the ability and willing- 
ness to work, is absolutely certain (provided a fellow 
has sound health) to win for him genuine and en- 
during success. 

Finally and superlatively, the business man must 
know how to deal with men. Just as actual gold 
and silver play very little part in actual business 
transactions, their place being taken by that in- 



134 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

tangible yet most real thing called credit, so the 
mechanical processes of production, distribution, and 
exchange are almost insignificant in business in com- 
parison with the intellectual and moral processes of 
meeting, influencing, and commanding men. The 
merchant has to study men, to understand them, to 
put himself, hourly, in right relations with them if he 
hopes to succeed, not only as a man of business but 
as a citizen. And this kaleidoscopic problem of 
human intercourse divides itself roughly into four 
main groups: into the men above one, the men below 
one, the men on a level with one, and, by no means 
least, that most important man, one's self. Granted 
that a man's daily work is well and faithfully done, 
his business reputation will come from his study of 
and efforts with these four classes of human beings, 
greater and smaller in number, who fill in the entire 
circle of his daily world. 

As to a man's dealings with those above him, he 
will be concerned chiefly with two classes: those who 
employ him and those other older persons who may 
have it in their power to help or to hinder. What 
should be one's attitude toward these men? It 
should invariably be that of respectful self-respect. 
Diffidence or cringing humility on the one hand is as 
much to be avoided as "freshness" or obtrusiveness 
on the other; but, while always deferential to the 



THE DEMANDS OF BUSINESS 135 

experience of these older men, while always mindful 
that one's ''boss" has a powxr which, in a moment 
of dyspepsia or of irritation toward some one else, 
he may arbitrarily and unjustly exercise upon you, 
no one should be awed by the mere fact of age. The 
difference in real feeling (except with an occasional 
curmudgeon) between the elder and the younger 
man is very slight; deep down in his heart the middle- 
aged man, notwithstanding his years of experience, 
is rarely very confident of himself, and, not seldom, 
is about as afraid of the youth as the youth is of him. 
Moreover, there is almost always a soft spot, half- 
compassionate, half-regretful, in every old man's 
heart for youth. ^^ Si jeunesse savait; si vieillesse 
pouvaitJ^ And it is by tactful dealings with the 
particular manifestations of these common attri- 
butes in his special "boss" that many a man of 
ambition makes his way to-day. 

By this manifest eagerness to learn; by a willing- 
ness, too, to do anything within reason and within 
honesty that one's employer calls upon him to do; 
by a disposition, moreover, to do it as he likes to have 
it done; above al^., by a readiness to go ahead and 
do the thing immediately, quickly and thoroughly, 
without any ifs, ands, or buts, finding out for himself 
how the job is to be undertaken, and throwing him- 
self heart and soul into that particular task until it 



136 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

is done and done right — by these things, not by 
toadying or intercession of relatives or running down 
of rivals, will the young employee get the notice and 
the promotion that, eventually, are to make him 
master of his own career. 

Next in importance to his relations with those 
above him is the question of a man's ability in han- 
dling those placed under him. The marked char- 
acteristic of a leader of men is that he not only can 
do things himself but can get them properly done 
by his subordinates. This executive ability, eminence 
in which is the master key to success in this age of 
gigantic enterprises, is based, first, on the power 
to judge the capabilities of one's subordinates 
accurately; secondly, on the ability to make one's 
explanations and to give one's orders so clearly that 
these subordinates will produce just the results for 
which one is looking; and, thirdly, on knowing just 
how to drive the underlings so that they may be 
kept at the highest pressure consistent with the doing 
of good work, but may not feel themselves in any 
degree aggrieved or forced. All this means that 
one must give his subordinates the best possible 
conditions under which to work, must always be 
ready to work with them — but never to the point 
where any of them shall lose his feeling of personal 
responsibility for his particular share of the under- 



THE DEMANDS OF BUSINESS 137 

taking — must always be fair and gentlemanly (the 
word is used advisedly, for no man can ever afford not 
to be a gentleman) in one's dealings with them, and 
must exhibit unfailing readiness to work and buoy- 
ancy in working. 

The third group of persons with whom a man must 
deal will be those, so to speak, on a level with him. 
This includes, of course, his friends, his ordinary 
business associates, and his social acquaintances. 
A young man w ho hopes to get on simpl)^ because he 
is worthy of promotion will probably remain fixed 
like a sea-anemone till the end of time; but give 
him firm friends whom he has legitimately won by 
virtue of sterling qualities, and his merits will not 
long be unheralded and not much longer unappre- 
ciated. Not that even firm friends are always to be 
depended upon; competition is too keen and human 
nature is too uncertain for a man's friends always to 
hold by him. Nevertheless, if a young man makes 
a business of securing the right sort of acquaintances, 
and if, from these, he makes a deliberate effort to 
cultivate the friendship of those who not only are 
decent fellows but who, in all probability, will sooner 
or later make a mark in the world, he has then sur- 
rounded himself, like a feudal baron, with an army 
of unpaid retainers who, in one way or another way, 
in less degree or in greater measure, will protect and 



138 NEW DEIMANDS IN EDUCATION 

help and further him along that hard and dangerous 
road toward success which every one of us is trying 
to travel. 

And last, but in importance first, a man has every ^ 
minute in the day to deal with one unescapable per- 
son, himself. His chief work with this toughest 
problem of all will be to strengthen that mainspring 
of all success, his will. Acknowledging, as every one 
must, that the road to good fortune, no matter 
whether it be in business, in poetry, or in politics, is 
thickly strewn with disagreeable tasks, and that, 
as a rule, the greater the prize the more unpleasant 
and apparently thankless the preliminary labor, it 
is plain that a man, if he is to amount to anything, 
must have his will in such training that it will bend 
his body and his mind to the doing of the worst 
drudgery, to the facing of the most unpleasant odds, 
to the accomplishing of what they set out to do, no 
matter how many lions stand roaring and clawing 
in the path. If a man hopes to succeed in literature, 
he must tear up dozens of manuscripts and burn gal- 
lons of midnight oil before the public will even know 
that he exists; if he would be a leader in public life, 
he must begin at the bottom and creep up, step by 
step, kicked, hustled, and misunderstood, till the 
leaders ahead of him are forced to see his worth; if he 
would be a great surgeon or a successful lawyer, he 



.THE DEMANDS OF BUSINESS I39 

must long be patient-less and brief-less, must swal- 
low many an insult and work many a day for nothing 
before he can secure even the merest edge of a foot- 
ing in these overfilled professions; if he would be a 
really great merchant or manufacturer, a young man 
must put his pride in his pocket for many a long week, 
must do work that is merest drudgery for many a 
weary month, and, given the chance to show what 
he can do, must spend many a sleepless night 
studying and planning, lest through failure at 
this crucial moment his reputation be forever 
ruined. All this bitterness of spirit and all this 
drudgery can be borne only by a man of such will 
that he never loses sight of his determination to 
succeed, of such control over his will that it never 
flags in keeping up his courage, of such steadiness of 
will that it holds his thoughts and curbs his passions 
and directs his inclinations to the one end of achiev- 
ing real, enduring success. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISM 

HE WHO is nourished by the state owes him- 
self to the state — that is the creed alike 
of ancient Sparta and of modern socialism. 
In a modified form it should be the social religion of 
every citizen. For, from the point of view of the 
community, what frightful debtors we all are. Look 
at the balance-sheet of most of us when, at legal 
majority, we start upon our active careers. On the 
one side — the debit side — stand the myriad bene- 
fits of civilization, benefits won through ages of 
struggle and accumulation by millions of unknown 
men and women, each one adding something to the 
sum of civilization, not one taking anything into the 
world beyond. On that same debit side should be 
placed the nurture and the teaching which from 
parents, from friends, from that body of individuals 
called the state, we have, up to the time when we 
can go alone, freely received. Again, on that debit 
side stand the opportunities which are ours, under 
law and order and personal safety, to make careers 

140 



NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISM 141 

for ourselves, to earn a livelihood, to find happiness, 
to found homes, to live unharried by the terrors of 
the wilderness, the horrors of invasion, the discom- 
forts and dangers of a mediaeval or a pioneer life. 

And on the other side of this account, the credit 
side, what do we find? What part of this capital 
which the advancing civilization of centuries, the 
republican institutions of a hundred years, the 
devotion and self-denial of relatives and friends, have 
laid up for him, has any youth just entering upon 
active life paid in? Not one penny. Yet before 
his life shall have been ripened and ended, unless it 
has been lived in vain, his vast debt to the past must 
have been more than repaid and in its place must be 
found a balance of achievement to be added to that 
huge capital called civilization, which was his to 
draw upon when he set out in life and which, greatly 
augmented by his eff"orts and those of millions of his 
contemporaries, will be no less freely at the com- 
mand of his successors. 

It is untrue, then, that the world owes every man 
a living. On the contrary, the world pays in its 
capital in advance, and with most of us who have 
arrived at mature manhood or womanhood it is we 
who owe. To the majority has been given without 
stint a fund of health, of physical and mental power, 
of civilized environment, of unlimited opportunity; 



142 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

and, whether we like the arrangement or not, our 
lives, if they are to amount to an3^thing, must be 
devoted to the repayment of this social obligation. 
A fool in his heart may say: "I will live for myself 
alone, make money for myself, spend it upon me 
and mine, take all these benefits that the state gives 
to me, that civilization has provided for me, and do 
nothing in return; then indeed shall I overreach 
Providence and get much for nothing." But sooner 
or later, in his day, in that of his children, or of his 
children's children, the accumulated reckoning will 
be presented, and the debt will be exacted to its 
uttermost farthing, with bitterness and shame and 
suffering. 

Similarly, a nation or a commonwealth may say: 
"We have had great and splendid ancestors who 
built us a country and a government out of the 
wilderness, bought freedom for us with their sweat 
and blood, founded great industries and institutions 
of government, established schools and colleges; 
these ancestors of ours have made it possible for us, 
with comparative ease, to enrich ourselves; their 
inventions have opened to us a thousand ways of 
enjoyment of which they did not dream; therefore 
will we give ourselves up wholly to money getting 
and money spending, leaving such dry-as-dust 
questions as the civil service, municipal government, 



NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISM 143 

education, to those cranks, the political economists, 
and those low rascals, the professional politicians; 
therefore will we eat, drink, and be merry, turning 
over the state and the country to the tender mercies 
of the bosses. If they trouble us we will buy them 
off; if they shame us, we will go to Europe; if they 
bring the Republic to the brink of ruin, we will help 
to set up a dictator who will relieve us of all further 
thought about these tiresome questions of self- 
government." But to a commonwealth or a nation 
that banks upon the virtues and the self-denial of 
the forefathers, eating up its inherited capital of 
manliness, spending without investing, reaping 
without sowing, comes always the inevitable result, 
the result which has come over and over again to 
states and kingdoms — absolute decay and that 
oblivion which mercifully hides all dead and useless 
things. 

That ours may not be such a fate as this is one 
of the main reasons for the compulsory free school. 
That institution exists, ultimately, for the promo- 
tion and stimulation of active patriotism. There- 
fore we see the flag daily floating over almost every 
schoolhouse; therefore we find text-books in history 
exalting the national prowess and belittling all 
foreign peoples; therefore we find the pupils sing- 
ing, in a shouting fervor, doggerel verses fitted to 



144 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

ill tunes; therefore in many other ways we behold 
the emotions of the child-at-school kept at a fever- 
heat — all in the sacred name of patriotism. But 
even the hurried teacher, steeped in this loud love of 
country, must sometimes ask herself if the result is 
what it should be, if this patriotic "revivalism" is 
in harmony with the best methods in education, if 
it would be attempted to develop any other virtue in 
the perfervid ways through which custom and the 
temper of the times compel her artificially to stimu- 
late the pupil's love of country. 

To such self-questioning the answer could scarce- 
ly fail to be that while knowledge — if not always 
practice — in other directions in education has 
grown far out of emotionalism and crude sym- 
bolism, in this most important direction, this direc- 
tion of patriotism, the standards are still those of 
the ancient Fourth of July, when ardor was meas- 
ured wholly in terms of noise and extravagance of 
boasting. Like the fireworks which typified that 
day, the fervor of the child too often is exhausted 
in a blinding, spectacular outburst of flag-waving 
and song-singing, and there is left in later life but 
an empty stick, incapable of giving or sustaining 
any really loyal glow. 

This flag-raising and flag-waving, this singing of 
songs, these exaltations of national heroes, will be 



NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISM 145 

worse than futile, will be frightfully pernicious, unless 
the pupils understand their real significance, unless 
they clearly see that these are but symbols of and 
incentives to real patriotism, to a genuine activity 
in the upbuilding of that great Country into which 
the youth is fortunately born. Custom will for 
many years compel the teacher to cling to outward 
shows of patriotism; but unless she can make them 
mean something to the pupil, these so-called loyal 
exercises can scarcely fail to be a source of lasting 
damage rather than of help to future citizenship. 
Hypocrisy, unhappily, is very common in the world; 
but nowhere is there more of hypocrisy than in 
matters involving love of country. There is much 
mental confusion regarding all abstract ideas; but 
in nothing is there more confusion of mind than in 
regard to what constitutes real patriotism. Moral 
cowardice is the chief hindrance to most men's 
spiritual growth; and nowhere is moral cov/ardice 
and its prototype, moral laziness, more conspicuous 
than in questions of real loyalty. Because of this 
hypocrisy, this haziness of ideas, this moral weakness, 
there are always present in a republic two distinct 
kinds of patriotism, both claiming that sacred name, 
but as opposed to one another as are light and dark- 
ness. Discrimination between them is fundamental 
to sound citizenship. In common with all other 



146 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

abstract virtues, patriotism cannot be defined; but 
like a complicated mathematical problem, it may be 
reduced to its lowest terms, in some such way as this: 
The United States, as its name expresses, is a 
family of states inhabited by persons of like general 
ideas and bound together forever, each state inde- 
pendent, and yet giving up certain rights that it 
might have were it alone, in exchange for infinitely 
greater rights and blessings as part of a powerful 
nation. And what is a state but a family of cities, 
towns, and villages, each in a way independent, and 
yet each surrendering some of its independence in 
return for the far greater privileges that come to it 
as a member of the state? And what are those 
cities, towns, and villages but collections of families, 
each living its family life, but each giving up some 
part of its freedom in return for the common bene- 
fits received at the hands of the city or the town? 
And what, finally, is a family but a gathering of 
souls, each living its own life, absolutely required 
to work out its own destiny, but each getting in- 
finite help from every other and each giving up 
something of its individuality and freedom in order 
to secure that love, that mutual helpfulness, which 
make true home life above all things blessed? 
Therefore my country is nothing but my home on a 
vast scale, and the virtues of the home, making al- 



NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISM 147 

lowance for difference of degree, are the virtues of 
patriotism. What is right to do for the family is 
right to do for my country; what is wrong to do in 
the family is wrong to do in the nation. 

This simplifies the matter very greatly, and 
helps to clear up many confused points in this 
much-discussed and much-abused idea of patriotism. 
It makes clear, too, that he who does not carry the 
home virtues into public life, or who tries to sub- 
stitute certain other qualities that in private life 
would be called vices, but which he would try to 
persuade us become in public life virtues, is not a 
true patriot, no matter how loudly he may bluster 
about the flag and the honor of the nation. There 
is no national honor which is not based upon the 
honor of the individual; there are no patriotic 
virtues which are not also private virtues. 

Officials, therefore, who under pretence of serv- 
ing their country commit acts or help to pass laws 
contrary to private right and justice, or repugnant 
to the plain teachings of Christianity, are false 
patriots; and those who condone them or who sim- 
ply laugh at them, as well as those who applaud 
and reelect them, are parties with them in a crime 
against their country. There cannot be two stand- 
ards of morality, one for private life and another for 
public life. The moral law cannot be twisted so 



148 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

that what Is wrong for the individual becomes right 
for the elected representative of a number of in- 
dividuals, so that what is immoral for one man to do 
becomes not only moral but even praiseworthy when 
done by those collections of men known as cities, 
states, and nations. Right Is right and wrong Is 
wrong; but too many Americans, blameless in their 
private lives, think and act as though there were 
different standards of virtue for their public acts 
and duties. 

These may be called the chronic false patriots; 
against them the true patriots have to carry on a 
continuous and oftentimes disheartening struggle. 
But times of war or of lesser foreign complications 
bring forward, in addition, a great number of what 
may be called Intermittent false patriots; and one 
of the most dreadful accompaniments of any war Is 
the swelling of the ordinary ranks of corruption, 
greed, and hypocrisy by this new and clamorous 
body, made up of knaves and empty-headed per- 
sons who, under ordinary conditions, are kept, by 
public opinion, quiescent and comparatively harm- 
less. 

These intermittent false patriots always require 
an occasion for display of their windy loyalty; there 
must be a Fourth of July or an exciting election or 
a complication with some foreign power before they 



NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISxM 149 

can explode their patriotic fervor. The true pa- 
triot, however, does not have to wait for these ex- 
traordinary crises; he finds opportunity to work 
for his country every day in the week and every 
hour in the day. The windy patriot is always 
trying to stir up fights and complications in order 
that he may have a chance to brag and bluster; the 
true patriot is always endeavoring to keep matters 
peaceful and orderly, knowing that only under peace 
and order can really good government exist. There 
is no phrase more true than the old Latin one: "In 
time of war the laws are silent." During the crisis 
of war the machinery of good government has to 
stop, and through that stopping great national 
scandals — scandals of jobbery, peculation, and 
contract-swindling — are able to arise and grow. 
It is during such crises that the false patriots fasten 
upon the Government and fatten themselves upon 
the nobility, the generosity, the self-sacrifice of that 
true patriotism whose sacred name they have stolen 
as a cover for their crimes. 

What, now, does the humdrum, real patriot, need- 
ing no spur of loud occasions, do every day to show 
his patriotism? Simply his whole duty, as an in- 
dividual and as a citizen, knowing this to be the 
sum and substance of true love of country. Such a 
man understands the first duty of a patriot to be 



150 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

the leading of an honest, upright, thrifty, useful 
life. He knows that the next, and perhaps the 
greatest, duty of a patriot is toward his family: as a 
son, to honor and help his parents; as a brother, to 
live in closest union with his brothers and sisters; as 
a husband, to provide for the comfort and happiness 
of his wife; above all, as a father, to see that his 
children are properly cared for and rightly educated, 
physically, mentally, and morally. A great number 
of men, however, who scrupulously fulfil these first 
two demands are yet not good citizens and are, 
therefore, not true patriots ; for they are so absorbed 
in living their own lives and are so devoted to their 
families that they cannot perceive what very im- 
portant and essential duties still lie beyond. They 
forget, that is, the strictly civic duties growing out of 
a man's relations to others as a member of society. 

These civic duties, while wider in range, are dis- 
tinctly the same in character as a man's obligations 
to his family. It behooves him, as the head of a 
house, to live within his means, to pay his debts, to 
be scrupulously honest in all his transactions. In 
the same way it is his duty as a citizen to see that the 
town is well ordered, is economically administered, 
that all its officers — for whose acts he as a voter 
is directly responsible — are scrupulously honest, 
straightforward, just. It is a man's business, as a 



NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISM 151 

father, to make certain that his children are prop- 
erly reared, educated, and kept out of evil in- 
fluences. Similarly it is his duty as a citizen to see 
that the children of his own town or city are rightly 
educated; that due provision is made for the care of 
the poor, aged, and sick; that the town is kept as free 
as possible from temptations to idleness and vice. 
And through a long list of duties runs this paral- 
lelism, making close the relationship between family 
life and civic life and making even clearer that a 
man's obligations to his larger household, the mu- 
nicipality, are second only to his duties to that im- 
mediate household which is bounded by his own 
four walls. 

The duties of a citizen toward the state and to- 
ward the nation, seemingly less immediate and press- 
ing, are of such importance that, unless properly 
and fully performed, the state and nation must soon 
go to pieces. It may seem a perfunctory act, this 
voting for political representatives; but is it a light 
thing, a thing to be neglected, this giving to men 
one's power of attorney as a citizen, this giving 
them the right to say that their acts, no matter how 
wrong, are your acts.? Is it a small thing to choose 
men who shall have the power not only to regulate 
your life in a thousand ways, but even, in crises like 
those of war, to demand that life itself .f^ If the 



152 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

Republic of the United States — which is yet but 
an experiment — prove in the end a failure, it will 
be because of two things : the indifference of a great 
body of citizens toward the quality of their political 
representatives, and the hidebound partisanship 
of other great numbers of citizens, of men who place 
the success of party above the welfare of their 
country, men who, as has been often said, would 
vote for Beelzebub himself were he the regular 
nominee. 

This parallelism between the family, the town, 
the state, and the nation is no fanciful use of terms. 
The life of the family, of the town, of the state, and 
of the nation Is a vast. Intertwined, mutually depend- 
ent life. No national existence is sound which does 
not rest upon a pure and stable family life; family 
life, on the other hand, is impossible without the 
protection of the state and nation. Every one of 
the functions which each of these social bodies per- 
form Is absolutely essential to the existence of the 
other three. What hurts one injures the others; 
what corrupts one corrupts the others; what exalts 
one raises all the others. Therefore the false pa- 
triot is he who neglects any one of his four duties or 
who magnifies any one of them at the expense of 
the others. 

The man who is wholly absorbed in the care of 



NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISM 155 

his family, in money making, in the pleasures of his 
little circle, may be a model husband and father, 
but he falls far short of being a true patriot; and 
were such men in a majority, there would be no 
country wherein his pleasant, selfish little existence 
could find protection. The man, again, who, ab- 
sorbed in the petty struggles of his township, never 
looks up from the narrow valley of local affairs to 
the great hills of national and human interests, is no 
true patriot and would be almost equally useful to 
the world were he living in some isolated hut-village 
of the African jungle. Again, the man who, keen 
in the game of party politics, takes no thought for 
the good conduct of his city or his town, giving its 
control into the hands of the first set of rogues who 
choose to fasten themselves upon it, is a foolish and 
mischievous false patriot, for he is striving to build 
the superstructure of political life upon a rotten 
foundation. Finally, the man who, filled with the 
splendid idea of nationality, drunk with the swell- 
ing liquor of manifest destiny, believes that the 
nation is everything, that since it is big it must be 
made bigger, since it has strength it must show that 
strength as prize fighters do, is no true patriot unless 
he can show that the foreign complications which 
must be the outcome of aggressive national dis- 
play are of such character that the damage which 



154 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

war inevitably brings is less than the resulting good. 
Our Civil War, having as its objects the real union 
of a nation that had been but nominally welded and 
the doing away of a great moral wrong sapping the 
national character, was amply justified; yet we have 
not to this day recovered from the demoralization 
which that war entailed. Before a nation plunges 
into any war, be it ever so sacred in its object, be- 
fore the people of that nation begin madly to ap- 
plaud the extravagance and glitter and excitement of 
the show, let them count up a few of the evil things 
which follow in the train of war : the breaking up of 
families, with all the suffering and sorrow which 
that brings; the death or demoralization worse than 
death of great numbers of young men; the arousing 
of the worst and most savage passions — hatred, 
revenge, blood thirstiness; the setting aside of the 
ways and methods of good government under stress 
of the sudden, urgent demands of national peril; 
and, not least, the distortion of men's minds so that 
they come to believe that this alone, this hurrah and 
excitement, this blood and hate and vengeance, is 
patriotism, and that ordinary faithfulness to the 
humdrum duties of everyday life is not real love of 
country. Dreadful as are all the other damages of 
war, there is perhaps none worse than this; wicked 
as are most of the excuses for this relic of savagery, 



NEED FOR REAL PATRIOTISM 155 

there is none wickeder than the statement that war 
is needed to put iron in our blood, to save us from 
becoming milksops. The courage of the battlefield 
is glorious, but it is paid for in the dearest coin that 
the world possesses. And there is an equal courage: 
the doing for a lifetime of a man's whole duty in 
every possible direction. Moreover, this latter 
courage, far from costing the country anything, 
brings in a wonderful revenue of increasing civiliza- 
tion, of high achievements and ever higher ideals, 
of, in the broadest sense, Christianity. We Amer- 
icans do indeed need iron in our blood, but it is iron 
that shall make us do our dull, plodding, tiresome, 
patriotic duties day after day. This alone is the 
patriotism to be taught in schools; and unless these 
ideals of duty toward one's country are made vital 
in the school-life, the flag salutes, the singing, the 
national self-glorification will result in a nation of 
swashbucklers, not one of patriots. 



CHAPTER X 

THE DEMAND FOR TRAINED CITIZENS 

THE old philosophy, curiously jumbled with 
necromancy and alchemy, sought, among 
others, two things: a philosopher's stone 
to transmute base metals; a master- word to solve 
the riddle of the universe. Dearly bought experi- 
ence has taught the futility of both these questions, 
though it is still easy to find intelligent investors 
in sea-water gold and well-educated believers in 
persons claiming supernatural powers. Men who 
speak and write are still tempted, however, to seek 
a master-word, especially in the domain of history. 
With earlier historians that master-word was King 
or Dynasty; later it was Hero; while to-day it may 
be said to be The Citizen. And when one thinks 
what part citizenship has played in history; when 
one remembers the significance of the Roman citi- 
zen, of the mediaeval burgher, of the freeman of 
our colonial history, of le citoyen in and after the 
French Revolution, and how intimate has been the 

156 



DEMAND FOR TRAINED CITIZENS 157 

connection between modern progress and the in- 
creasing rights and duties of the citizen, it really 
seems as if Citizenship might be the master-word 
of human history. 

However this may be, the free public school 
could not for a moment justify itself excepting as 
a training-ground for citizenship. Hard as it may 
be to do so, the teacher must see through the inertia, 
the dulness, the semi-brutishness of her worst 
pupils the vision of the ideal citizen and must strive 
to carry even them to what is plainly an impossible 
goal. The late Doctor Runkle once declared that 
the Russians had solved the problem of manual 
training as a culture study by putting youth not 
into construction but into instruction shops. This 
is entirely true from the point of view of the shop; 
but from the point of view of the boy, a good school 
is not an xTzstruction, it is a construction shop; 
and the article to be constructed out of the materials, 
good or bad, which God has furnished is the charac- 
ter, as a social being, of each and every pupil in 
that school. The mode of construction signifies 
little; the kind of citizenship constructed means 
the life or the ultimate death of the community. 
Training for citizenship is as inseparable from 
public education as morality is indivisible from 
religion. As church teaching is barren unless it 



XS8 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

have regard to the moral life, so secular instruction 
is fruitless unless it have as its goal the life of the 
individual citizen and of that human aggregation 
which we call society. 

Instruction in so-called civics, the singing of 
patriotic songs, and the saluting of the flag con- 
stitute, however, only a small fraction of that 
training for citizenship which it is the school's duty 
to give. For there are three aspects of citizenship, 
and of these civics and patriotism (in the narrower 
sense) relate only to the least important. Those 
three aspects, named in the order of their increasing 
significance, are political citizenship, economic citi- 
zenship, and social citizenship. It is, of course, 
material that a young man should recognize and 
understand his duties as a voter and a politician; 
but it is of still more consequence that he should 
appreciate his duty, and should be trained to per- 
form his full share, as a producer, as a doer of work 
that is useful economically, as an earner of that 
livelihood which, while immediately benefiting him 
and his family, promotes at the same time the com- 
mon weal. And it is most important of all that 
he should understand and should be fitly prepared 
for service as a social citizen: for his duties, that 
is, as a son, a brother, a husband, a father, a neigh- 
bor, and a friend. 



DEMAND FOR TRAINED CITIZENS 159 

The school, of course, cannot directly teach a 
boy how to be a citizen any more than it can teach 
him to be an electrician or a bank clerk; it cannot 
prepare him for the responsibilities of life any far- 
ther than the college can fit its students to be bank 
presidents or to be organizers of trusts that will 
(and do) hold water. In all such things experience 
must be the real and final teacher; but experience 
can do no teaching, or she can do it only at enormous 
and unnecessary cost, unless the right traits, habits, 
qualities, and states of mind are there In the youth 
for experience to work with and upon; unless the 
man who Is to learn through experience Is possessed 
of certain fundamental and essential tools. 

In the hands of a true teacher, training for polit- 
ical citizenship Is comparatively simple. To teach 
civics is easy, because it connects so readily with 
the boy's life and surroundings; to inspire patriotism 
is not difficult, because one can appeal to the emo- 
tions, can enlist music and poetry, can make use of 
the chlvalric, hero-worshipping side of the youth, 
can illustrate with splendid concrete instances. It 
should not be impossible for any and every school 
to give, by the end of the grammar-school course, 
or early in the high-school period, a good knowl- 
edge of the machinery of government, of the Imme- 
diate duties of a voter, of the history of the United 



i6o NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

States, of the principles at the basis of its develop- 
ment, together with that general feeling of loyal 
aspiration and devotion which is meant by pa- 
triotism. 

Preparation for economic and social citizenship, 
however, is a far more serious task, because of the 
immense range of industrial and social life and of 
the intangibility of the qualities to be instilled. As 
Boston is shrewdly said to be not so much a place 
as a state of mind, so to educate for economic and 
social citizenship by teaching specific trades and 
occupations, or to prepare for social citizenship by 
giving lectures on parental duty, would be as idle 
as it would be wrong. What has to be done is, 
first, to determine those qualities which lie at the 
foundation of sound economic and social citizenship, 
and then to develop those qualities in the high- 
est degree possible to each individual child. The 
important thing is to have one's vision fixed, not 
on what one is teaching, but on what one is teaching 
for. The present squirming boy is such a large and 
irritating fact that he is apt to eclipse the vision 
of him as, twenty years hence, a useful man; the 
arithmetic and spelling lessons look so large as often 
to shut out the splendid ends to which they are the 
very commonplace and tiresome means. 

What, then, is the ideal citizen, the vision of whom 



DEMAND FOR TRAINED CITIZENS i6i 

no teacher must for a moment lose? It Is he who 
is healthy in body and in mind, who takes life 
seriously but joyously, who does his duty not as a 
penance but as a privilege. It is he who does not 
shirk political activity, who votes from knowledge, 
not from prejudice; who does not seek ofHce but who, 
if the office seek him, serves without fear or favor. 
It is he who loves his country so well that, not wait- 
ing bravely to die for her, he is willing nobly to live 
for her. It is he who, fearing no kind or amount of 
work, labors not by compulsion but by choice. It 
is he who, without bemoaning his condition, seeks 
always to improve it, ambitious to make every 
moment and every faculty tell. It Is he whose 
morals are as clean as his body, whose mind and eye 
alike are clear, who respects himself too much to 
descend to mean actions and low thoughts. It 
is he whose brain is active, whose hands are skilled, 
who can fix the mind absolutely on what he is 
doing and can hold mind and hand down to the 
present task till it be thoroughly done. It Is he 
who, meeting an obstacle, does not sit down de- 
spairingly before it, but exerts every faculty to find 
a way over or under or around that obstacle. It is 
he who lives In real democratic relations with his 
kind, having due regard for their rights, yet careful 
of his own, having good manners to attract men, 



i62 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

tact to lead men, integrity to hold men, and power 
to command men. It is he who in due time marries, 
devoting himself to his family but not allowing home 
life to absorb all his interests. It is he, finally, 
who, in seeking a good living, seeks also, and more 
eagerly, the good and useful life. 

Such a man is like a perfectly constructed machine 
of which the mind and soul are in complete, intel- 
ligent command; a beneficent machine, moreover, 
working at one and the same time for its own good, 
its neighbor's good, and the bettering of all man- 
kind. Citizenship like this means both personal 
power and a strong sense of human kinship. Power 
to do and power to work together should be, there- 
fore, the broad aims of public-school endeavor and 
of community endeavor. The school and the town 
must do their utmost to arouse and strengthen 
in every boy and girl the ability to play the largest 
part possible in the life of the community. 

To do this the school must furnish the child with 
certain fundamental arts essential to the social life. 
The boy or girl must be taught, that is, to read, to 
write, to spell, to cipher; he must be made ac- 
quainted with the configuration, the products, the 
nations of the earth, and must be given some 
general knowledge of the history of those nations. 
Moreover, he must be trained in the customs of 



DEMAND FOR TRAINED CITIZENS 163 

society (that is, in good manners) and in the arts 
necessary to useful intercourse with men. Further- 
more, these bodies of growing youth met together 
in the schoolroom must be accustomed to acting 
in concert, led to feel their dependence upon one 
another, made to see the great and multiply- 
ing interrelations of all human society. Even 
more than this, however, the school ought, so 
far as it can, to train, foster, and direct the 
moral, mental, and physical powers of each 
individual child toward his highest individual 
development. 

How is this to be done? First, and most impor- 
tant, by the creation of a schoolroom atmosphere, 
of a town atmosphere, of a home atmosphere charged 
with high purpose, with unflinching morality, with 
the desire for mutual helpfulness, with lofty personal 
and social ideals. To create such an atmosphere 
in the school the teacher will conduct all his exer- 
cises not because they are set down in a printed 
curriculum, but because they are stepping-stones 
to a broad and useful life. A whimsical school 
board can prescribe no course of study so foolish 
I that a teacher who sees clearly the purpose of his 
leaching may not use this unscientific curriculum 
m a scientific way. Were this not so, committee- 
ipiade courses of study, machine-made text-books. 



i64 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

and intemperate temperance propaganda would long 
ago have swamped the schools. 

Here, then, on the one hand, we have the con- 
ventional school topics, well or ill arranged, and with 
prescribed text-books good, or mostly bad. On 
the other hand, we have the twenty-five pupils — 
and I say twenty-five because a teacher with more 
than that number is a policeman, not an educator. 
Between them stands the schoolmaster appointed 
to carry the pupils by means of the course of study 
as far as may be toward good citizenship. It is 
not for any one except that teacher to say exactly 
how this is to be done. But it is for all educated 
teachers, it is for all thoughtful citizens outside the 
teaching profession, to say and to insist that to 
train citizens is what that teacher is in that school- 
room for. If he (or she), even with the poorest 
human material to work upon, cannot do this, if 
he cannot, that is, carry his pupils during the year 
a little farther on toward the ideal of true citizenship, 
then he is no fit teacher, and neither normal school 
diploma nor college degree can persuade us that 
he is. 

Just at present the public is more ready to de- 
mand and to encourage fine buildings than fine 
teachers. The lofty schoolhouses make a civic 
show; the high-aiming teachers do not. This is 



DEMAND FOR TIL\INED CITIZENS 165 

a tendency to be steadily fought against, for it 
leads directly toward that materialism which it 
should be the business of education to counteract. 
Well housed, healthfully housed, the schools should 
of course be; but every dollar spent on needless 
elaboration is money filched from the real work of 
education. No city or town has any business to 
put up elaborate school buildings so long as its 
teaching staff is undermanned, underpaid, or under- 
educated. We must beware, also, of too much 
pedagogical furniture in those already overcrowded 
schoolrooms. Elaborate organization is alluring; 
experimentation is dangerously easy. But they 
tempt the teacher, not seldom, into a fatal depend- 
ence upon formalism, into a facile mechanizing 
of education, into unwise conclusions based upon un- 
certain facts. 

The true teacher, or, rather, a succession of fit 
teachers, with vision fixed on the ideal citizen, will 
make the conventional subjects of the elementary 
school serve a double purpose. Considering the 
topics as ends in themselves, those successive good 
teachers will make the pupil into a good reader, 
able to penetrate and visualize the meaning when 
he reads to himself, able to express that meaning 
by the modulations of his voice when he reads aloud. 
They will make him a good speller, sure of the pre- 



i66 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

cedence of wayward letters; a good writer, com- 
petent to make a clear and handsome page; a 
ready cipherer, able to differentiate addition from 
multiplication and confident of the final results 
of his neatly arranged columns. And this the good 
teacher will do because he appreciates the vast 
importance of these little arts in economic and in 
social life. But, farther than this, and using these 
same arts as means, the genuine educator will 
employ them to develop and perfect that clearness 
of thinking, that concentration of mind, that ac- 
curacy of statement, that faithfulness in the doing 
of little things, that readiness of resource, which 
are the foundation and the capstone of success. 

As to the other usual studies of the common 
school, this teacher will employ them, first, to 
promote those qualities already named, and, sec- 
ondly, to build up other virtues essential to useful 
citizenship. Geography will be availed of, for 
example, to give breadth of view, tolerance of 
others' ideas, a sense of the mutual dependence of 
mankind; history will be used to build up courage, 
civic devotion, belief in the ultimate triumph of 
the right; manual training will be employed to 
coordinate the hand and head, to inspire respect 
for the labor of the hands; together with sci- 
ence study, shop-work will be used to develop keen 



DEMAND FOR TRAINED CITIZENS 167 

common sense, readiness of resource, adaptability 
to new conditions; music and drawing will be 
availed of to train the eye and the ear, and to 
cultivate aesthetic appreciation. And, in season 
and out of season, the good teacher will instil the 
principles of healthful living, of physical care, of 
temperance in the true meaning, not in the distorted 
text-book sense, of that much abused word. 

Those who have had to do with commercial life 
appreciate what enormous and unnecessary waste, 
what needless friction and sticking of the economic 
machinery, come from preventable sickness, and 
still more from inefficiency due to bad diet, un- 
sanitary conditions, and ignorance of the simplest 
principles of health; they know under what dis- 
advantages all business and manufacturing are 
carried on because the workmen, the clerks, and, 
indeed, the partners and proprietors are wanting 
in power to use their minds, are clumsy with their 
hands, or, if not clumsy manually, seem to have no 
pathway between mind and hand. They will have 
seen many a man fail of success and of that comfort 
which should have been his because he had not 
been taught to reason, to concentrate his thoughts, 
to persevere; because he lacked tact, breadth of 
view, adaptability, "gumption." We spare no 
pains to train the blind, the deaf, the dumb; yet 



i68 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

we send out from our schools thousands and tens 
of thousands who, having eyes, see not, having ears, 
hear not, having tongues, are powerless to speak 
to their fellowmen except in a meaningless tittle- 
tattle as futile as the chattering of apes. To reduce 
the number of these mental and moral defectives 
is one of the most important functions of the school. 

If emphasis seems to have been laid upon the 
economic rather than upon the social side of citizen- 
ship, it is because that in cultivating economic and 
civic virtues the moral virtues will be at the same 
time, and perhaps even more fully, stimulated. In 
getting command of his mind and body, the youth 
Avill become sovereign also of his will; and moral 
living Is simply the reward of a disciplined and 
educated will. 

Nevertheless, in some way, greater emphasis 
must be laid, in the school, upon morals; deliberate 
effort must be made to prepare boys and girls for 
that parental duty and responsibility which, with 
most of them, is to be the really important business 
of their uneventful lives. Moral discipline was the 
sole original purpose of Christian education. The 
advance — and it is immense — which has come 
from taking religious teaching out of the common 
schools has not been all gain. For, in shunning 
sectarianism, we have too often lost sight of the 



DEMAND FOR TRAINED CITIZENS 169 

fact that the object of all education should be the 
moral life. Somehow, without precipitating the 
child into the whirlpool of religious controversy, 
it must be made evident to him that moral living 
is the supreme end of life, that what he learns, what 
he does, what he accomplishes is to the sole purpose 
of upbuilding society, of bettering the world, of 
attaining genuine salvation. This may appear to 
be an impossible goal, this work may seem to be 
the church's, not the school's, it may savor of the 
visionary and Utopian, but it should be, I am con- 
vinced, the aspiration of all high-minded teachers; 
it must sooner or later be the ultimate purpose of 
all public education if this nation is not to disappear, 
as so many earlier ones have been swallowed up, 
in rank materialism. To teach boys and girls and 
to ignore that in them which alone is permanent, 
is indeed to try to make bricks without straw, is 
indeed to attempt to train for citizenship without 
knowledge of what citizenship means. 

This, then, is the problem which every one, 
whether a professor In a university, a teacher In the 
schools, or simply a plain citizen, has always before 
him for solution. Some boys and girls may be 
carried very far, some can be dragged only a dis- 
couragingly short way, along the weary road to 
ideal citizenship. But there is no normal child born 



I70 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

who may not be taken some distance along the true 
way, provided, of course, that the school, the city, 
and the home conditions permit of giving him a 
genuine education. These conditions essential to 
real education are, broadly speaking: proper, health- 
ful, moral surroundings, freedom from political cor- 
ruption, small classes in the schools, well-educated 
and enthusiastic teachers, and genuine interest and 
support from that public to which the public schools 
belong. 

It is an impressive allegory — that of the army 
of the children, that mighty army of boys and girls 
knocking at the gates of our city, seeking to possess 
what we have, striving to rule that kingdom which 
is now ours. That irresistible army of the children 
— for, whether we oppose them or whether we wel- 
come them, in thirty years, in forty years, in fifty 
years, they will have conquered us, they will have 
taken the places of us who lie dead upon the battle- 
field. That army of the children, however, can 
make the city which was once ours more beautiful, 
more influential, more worth while to live in; or, 
on the other hand, can give itself up to rioting, to 
pillage, to the physical and moral destruction of 
this city, no longer ours, but irrevocably theirs. 
Whether they shall build up or whether they shall 
pull down it is for us to determine; for in our 



DEMAND FOR TRAINED CITIZENS 171 

hands lies the training of that army for its work. 
To-day we are, to-morrow they will be, the citizens ; 
and whether or not they are to be true and efficient 
citizens rests entirely with us. It is our business 
to see to it, therefore, that the atmosphere and the 
educative influences of this vast present-day city 
of civilization are the very best, the very most 
efficient, the very most uplifting to boys and girls 
that it is possible for them to be. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE DEMAND FOR DISCIPLINE 

IN THAT fountain of truth, of philosophy, of 
inspiration, as well as of pure English, for lack 
of acquaintance with which modern children 
are suffering irreparable damage: in the King James 
version of the Bible, it is asserted that "He that 
spareth his rod hateth his son." This sentiment, 
variously phrased and modified, appears many 
times in the Scriptures and, in the popular form of 
"Spare the rod and spoil the child," has had incal- 
culable effect upon methods of education. How 
many millions of little backs have smarted, how 
many millions of little minds have been tormented 
by the too literal application of this, in its right inter- 
pretation, most excellent text. A careful consid- 
eration of the various phases of what is commonly 
called modern education will show that almost every 
step in it, almost every argument used in its behalf, 
has had foundation in a rebellion against this old 
biblical assertion; and those who have doubts con- 
cerning these elaborate new systems found them 

172 



DEMAND FOR DISCIPLINE 173 

upon a fear lest the revolt against the rod of dis- 
cipline may be carried too far and that, at the very 
hands of those who would save him from the wrongs 
of the old education, the child may be spoiled by 
equal errors and follies in the new. 

Physical fibre, mental fibre, moral fibre are what 
education exists to develop in the child; and this 
fibre can be built up, toughened, and made good for 
something only by a judicious, daily application of 
the rod. Not, of course, by the actual birch of the 
proverbial pedagogue, but by the subtle, invisible, 
though none the less efficacious, rod of hard work, 
real, persistent effort, and steady discipline. 

The old education, with its sound thrashings and 
unsound psychology, with its Latin grammar and 
more Latin grammar and still more Latin grammar, 
produced a hard-headed, hard-fisted, hard-hearted 
race, but it was, in the main, a race sound physically, 
mentally, and morally. Many of the new methods, 
on the other hand, methods of gentle cooing toward 
the child's inclinations, of timidly placing a chair for 
him before a disordered banquet of heterogeneous 
studies, may produce ladylike persons, but they will 
not produce men. And when these modern methods 
go so far as to compel the teacher to divide this intel- 
lectual cake and pudding into convenient morsels 
and to spoon-feed them to the child, partly in obedi- 



174 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

cnce to his schoolboy cravings, partly in conformity 
to a pedagogical diet-list dictated by the latest out- 
givings of physiological psychology, then the result 
is sure to be mental and moral dyspepsia in a race 
of milksops. 

We have learned much — are learning more every 
day — about questions of educational diet, we are 
devising ever better methods of cooking and serving 
that diet in the schools ; but in our zeal we are for- 
getting that, above all else, a child must be taught 
to feed himself, and must be fed upon material 
of such robust quality that his mental teeth will 
be compelled to masticate, that his apperceptive 
stomach will have to digest, that his whole moral 
system will be obliged to keep itself steadily and 
healthily at work. 

It is needless to recount the horrors of the old 
regime, when the rod, not a mere symbol, was an 
ever-present fact of education. So far as relates to 
teaching, those were slave days and the schoolmaster 
was a slave-driver, scantily paid to whip children 
into the doing of hard and hateful tasks. Neither 
needs one to expatiate upon the blessings of the 
present day, when the child, all unconscious that he 
is accomplishing anything disagreeable, is smilingly 
led, by devious and often extraordinary ways, into 
the doing of tasks which really must be done, but 



DEMAND FOR DISCIPLINE 175 

which the pupil must on no account know that he 
is doing lest he take offence at the very thought of 
having done them. But in this change from driving 
to coaxing is there not being created a new slave, 
the teacher, and a new slave-driver, the pampered 
child? And in freeing the child from the visible 
ills of hard, disagreeable tasks is he not being de- 
livered into the hands of that worst enemy of man- 
kind, an undisciplined will? Moreover, how are 
these modern slave-drivers, the children, when they 
in turn shall become teachers, to be brought to 
bend their backs in pedagogical slavery? And how, 
when the time comes for them to mold the lives of 
the next generation, are they to do this if they are 
themselves ignorant as to the ruling of their own 
lives ? 

It is the tritest of sayings that there is no royal 
road to learning; but too many of the modern school 
methods ignore this truism, or, rather, seem to be- 
lieve that the road can be travelled vicariously by 
the teacher, who, working to the uttermost edge of 
her nerves, must perform prodigious intellectual 
journeys in order to spare a few steps of wholesome 
drudgery to the unwisely cosseted pupil. 

Observation of the child himself ought to explode 
the notion that drudgery and steady application, 
provided they be wisely supervised, are bad for him. 



176 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATIOxN 

Nobody else in the world works harder than a 
baby and none other accomplishes more in the same 
period of time. The infant, it is true, has the 
several great advantages that his relatives do not 
appreciate how hard he is laboring, that he would 
not understand them even were they to commiserate 
him, and that he is compelled by nature to do one 
thing — at most, a very few things — at a time, 
devoting himself heart and soul to just those tasks, 
without any distractions from outside. But, under 
these admirable educational conditions, the baby 
tutors himself thoroughly and excellently up to that 
point where adult outsiders begin to interfere, and 
to force upon him methods, wise and unwise, of 
formal education. 

Unless one has watched a baby from day to day, 
he would scarcely believe how many times the child 
tries to coordinate his muscles, to use his hands 
rightly, to balance himself, before he arrives at any 
sort of automatic action. It is astonishing how fre- 
quently he practises each word, often whispering it 
over and over to himself, before he acquires that 
small vocabulary which makes all later learning pos- 
sible. It is extraordinary how much power of con- 
centration and observation is necessary to accomplish 
the stupendous task of learning to control his body 
and to use its senses. Doubtless the process Is 



DEMAND FOR DISCIPLINE 177 

fun to the child because of the new sensations and 
the stimulation of his daily progress. Nevertheless, 
in the first three or four years of his life the infant 
achieves marvels, and he accomplishes these won- 
ders by concentration, by untiring repetition, by 
complete absorption in what he is doing, by prodig- 
ious exercise of memory, by great skill in observation, 
and by quite mature use of induction and deduction. 

All these powers are essential to the thorough 
learning of anything; yet some of these faculties, so 
fostered by the old education, are shamefully neg- 
lected by the new. Habit through repetition, for 
example, strengthening of the memory, power of con- 
centration, fearlessness of disagreeable work, were 
most wisely cultivated by the ancient processes; 
and the new education will make a fatal mistake if, 
in its zeal to develop the individuality of the child, 
his powers of observation, of Induction, of deduction, 
it overlooks the equally Important educational 
factors of concentration, of memorizing, of habit, 
of doing a thing simply for the exercise of doing it: 
if it overlooks, in short, the fact that drudgery Is 
one of the greatest of moral and educational forces. 

But this hard-working baby, even in the grimmest 
Puritan days, was surrounded by an atmosphere of 
mother-love and helpfulness — at the worst, by a 
wintrv sunshine extracted from the doctrine of 



178 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

infant damnation by the alchemy of a baby's smile. 
As soon, however, as the Puritan child could be 
made conscious of original sin, the rod began its 
work, and thereafter parent and pedagogue vied 
with one another in birching sin out and the Latin 
grammar in. The long, hard lesson which, since those 
days, education itself has had to learn is that sym- 
pathy, that encouragement, that interest in him as 
an individual are as essential to the child and youth 
as to the baby; and, as the best result of this lesson, 
there has been substituted, in teaching, the power of 
helpfulness for the force of compulsion. 

In banishing from the schools, however, almost 
eveiy kind of hardship and compulsion, there is 
danger of overlooking the good principles which lay 
behind the bad practices of whipping. It is, of 
course, very wrong to chastise a child for breaking 
petty rules devised by our unwisdom; but it is 
equally wrong not to give his conscience such a 
thorough and hard discipline that it will whip him 
soundly every time that he disobeys wise laws 
which he is capable of understanding. It is cruel 
and inhuman to force a pupil to the doing of mo- 
notonous tasks just for the sake of keeping him at 
work; but it is equally cruel never to teach him how 
to do a hard task and how to stick to it against his 
strongest inclinations. One is now considered to 



DEMAND FOR DISCIPLINE 179 

be frightfully behind the times if he attempts to 
teach a child the multiplication table and similar 
things seemingly fundamental to ordinary knowl- 
edge; but is one quite right in sparing him these 
disagreeable things now if, in doing so, one is laying 
up for him a store of trouble in the future through 
his ignorance of these memorized facts? And is it 
quite unpedagogical to believe that since the baby, 
in order to train himself, will make the same monot- 
onous movement or repeat the same tiresome word 
day after day, without seeming fatigue, therefore 
early childhood, even up to the tenth or twelfth year, 
is the time for that drudgery in memorizing and in 
systematizing which, sooner or later, ought to be 
gone through with? And while none would dare 
to ask a modern teacher to drive a child through 
the Latin grammar, is one quite justified in telling 
her to spare him every kind of disagreeable task? 
For is one giving the child, by thus smoothing every 
pebble from his path, the proper preliminary train- 
ing for a world that, even under the best conditions, 
bristles with disagreeable duties? 

As has been said, the business of education is to 
make sound physical, mental, and moral fibre; and 
human fibre of any kind is built up only by constant 
and judicious exercise. Therefore common sense 
would dictate tliat where there is any physical weak- 



iSo NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

ness, this less strong part of the body should be 
carefully, but still thoroughly, exercised to equal 
strength with the rest; that where there is mental 
slowness or blankness, this deficient part of the brain 
should be put, by careful development, on a par 
with the rest; that where there is moral flabbiness, 
these halting portions of the character should be 
strengthened, in the only way they can be trained, 
by wisely repeated exercise. 

So far as relates to his physical nature, the play 
instinct, where conditions are right, will take care of 
the child, developing and exercising his muscles just 
as they may need. To reason, however, that be- 
cause the play instinct, when given proper scope, 
will care for the children's bodies, therefore a kindred 
instinct will train their minds and morals, on con- 
dition only that there be offered to their minds a 
widely elective course and to their morals a sunny 
atmosphere, is the falsest of analogies. Yet in the 
desire to keep the child in sympathetic surroundings, 
in the wish to spare him even a suggestion of the 
rod, the new education is in serious danger of pro- 
viding too much atmosphere and too little training, 
of taking the pupil forward along lines of least mental 
resistance, and of expecting that, contrary to the 
experience of mankind since the beginning of history, 
well-disciplined minds will result although there 



DEMAND FOR DISCIPLINE iSi 

has been no formal discipline, that a moral habit 
will be established even though few opportunities for 
the exercise of the virtues have ever been afforded. 

The fundamental error in much that passes for 
good education is in providing for too much surface 
and too little depth. Education is made an end rather 
than a means. It is not what we teach, it is how we 
teach, that is essential. In attempting to improve 
the public schools the mistake has been made of 
increasing the curriculum instead of the teaching 
force. Given the tools of reading, writing, and 
figuring, the good teacher will make one further 
study, if need be, serve every purpose of primary 
education. The mental vice of these newspaper 
days is superficiality; this vice the schools are doing 
much to encourage. Make the child accurate, thor- 
ough, persistent, and logical, and let mere infor- 
mation take a second place. If he has acquired 
these qualities, he has learned how to study; in 
teaching him how to study the school has done a 
large share of its proper work. Beyond giving him 
the tools of knowledge, the primary teaching can do 
little toward increasing the child's stock of infor- 
mation; that will come to him outside the school- 
room. 

It cannot be too often repeated that the school 
is a gymnasium for making the child acquisitive, 



i82 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

receptive, strong. The teaching of many subjects 
does not conduce to this. The immature brain is 
naturally restless and roving; it is for the school to 
give it the power of concentration. A child's mind 
is impatient and easily diverted; it is for the school 
to teach it patience and perseverance. A hasty 
clutching at many things is easier and pleasanter, to 
both teacher and pupil, than thorough mastery of 
any one thing; but the child who has really con- 
quered one subject is he who, in manhood, will win 
the knowledge of a thousand. 

Thanks to the ferment of modern ideas, it is now 
generally appreciated by teachers that twice as 
much — nay, ten times as much — can be done 
with a pupil through sympathy as through com- 
pulsion; it is now understood that interest plays 
an incalculable part in education; that a child learns 
twice as quickly and twice as well if he be led to what 
he likes than if he be driven to what he hates. It is 
seldom now, therefore, that a child is made to study 
a subject simply because he happens to dislike it. 
Likewise the uniform, Procrustean course is giving 
way to the elastic curriculum, in which the pupil 
is allowed some liberty of intelligent choice. More- ' 
over, the new education has discovered that to 
exercise the mind without also using the muscles is 
such torture to a child as adults can neither remembe/ 



DEMAND FOR DISCIPLINE 183 

nor imagine. Therefore the rod of rigid discipline 
in the schoolroom is being abandoned, and manual 
training, as well as ordered play, is giving needed 
scope to active muscles, and is arousing, at the 
same time, many a dormant mind. All this makes 
for a freer development of the child and for the 
strengthening of faculties and powers that the old 
education crushed or atrophied. But the new educa- 
tion, in its joy at these discoveries, in its zeal to put 
them in practice to the highest possible degree, 
runs, as is the nature of humanity, to the opposite 
extreme; and much that was good in the rod, much 
that was salutary, much that is absolutely essential 
to the moral fibre of the race, has been cast aside too. 
Hence many a youth to-day, expensively educated 
in an extreme of newness, has no tenacity of memory, 
no vigor of mind, no power of concentration, no 
ability to do real work. He may have skimmed over 
many topics, but he knows no one subject; he may 
exhibit a pretty facility and grace, but no depth or 
power of mind; he may possess a certain shielded 
innocence, but no deep-seated morality. Such a 
youth is a child at twenty, at that age when to be a 
child is to be the prey of every earthly evil. 

Were this to be the general result of new methods 
in education, were this weakening of his fibre in- 
separable from the training of a child under modern 



i84 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

conditions, one ought, in the cant phrase of the 
politician, to "view with alarm" the present situ- 
ation. But these shortcomings, serious though 
they may be, are only temporary, incident to a time 
of transition and readjustment. It is but natural 
for the new education to exalt its own newness and 
to decry the old-fashion of the former ways. No 
change of fashion, however, can alter eternal prin- 
ciples; and what was good, what was fundamental, 
in the ancient methods will endure, will prove itself 
indispensable, will eventually retake in all schools 
that place which in the best schools it has never 
lost. 

Teaching will never return to the use of the rod; 
doubtless it will never go back to the Latin grammar 
and to the sort of instruction which that grammar 
typifies; but, in one form or another, the new ideas 
will, as they adjust themselves, devise means to 
secure to the pupil that steady discipline and that 
wholesome drudgery essential to the development of 
sound mental and moral fibre. Meanwhile, through 
the ferment and often the wild license of this so- 
called new education will have been secured to every 
child his birthright of individual development, of 
self-expression, of sympathetic understanding and 
helpfulness from others. These could not have been 
attained without a reaction, often an excessive 



DEMAND FOR DISCIPLINE 185 

reaction, against the old methods of compulsion 
symbolized by the rod; but the final result will be 
such, it seems almost certain, as to justify even that 
present extravagance of laissez-faire and that foolish 
mollycoddling which bring many things in modern 
teaching into deserved contempt. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE DEMAND FOR A CITIZENS* HIGH SCHOOL 

THE free high school, in most of the States, 
is an accomplished fact. The public has 
decreed it, the teachers have accepted it, 
the whole educational scheme is based upon its 
permanency. Earnestly desiring to give every 
child a fair chance, fearful that without such oppor- 
tunity the world may lose talents which only the 
common secondary school can develop, jealous of an 
aristocracy of learning, and believing that a com- 
mon high school will break down such an aristocracy, 
the sovereign people, wisely or unwisely, have, in 
most of the leading centres of the country, decided 
that there shall be public high schools. In accept- 
ing the accomplished fact, however, we are not 
thereby bound to acquiesce in the common under- 
standing of what that free high school should be. 

It is not unjust to assert that in the usual con- 
ception of the high school it is one of two things: it 
is the upper part of the ladder — to use a hackneyed 
phrase — by which the poorest as well as the richest 

i86 



DEMAND FOR CITIZENS' HIGH SCHOOL 187 

may go straight from the cradle to the university, 
or it is itself the "people's college." Under the first 
conception the free high school tends to become, 
mainly, a fitting school for its neighboring colleges ; 
under the second it degenerates into a cheap edition, 
in paper covers and with popular illustrations, of 
that edition de luxe, the university. In the first 
case the school will probably offer a good course of 
study (viewed from the standpoint of book-learning), 
but one far too narrow; in the second it is sure to 
present courses whose range is exceeded only by 
their shallowness. 

Both these conceptions of what the secondary 
school should be and do are wrong. Any high 
school which acts upon them is misusing the people's 
money and taking the straight way to deserved ob- 
livion. The only justification for a common high 
school supported by the citizens is that it should 
develop a better citizenship. Only that high 
school has any right to live which has as its sole 
object the real education of its boys and girls into 
their fullest usefulness. This, of itself, should 
admit these boys and girls to any and every college; 
this, of itself, will so admit them when the high 
schools devote themselves to and accomplish this 
sole aim; this, moreover, if it be fully done and 
thoroughly availed of, will give these boys and girls 



i88 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

an ample university training for that profession 
which every decent American should follow — the 
profession of good citizenship. 

Let it keep steadily before itself this aim toward 
citizenship, and the high school becomes a tre- 
mendous social force, justifying almost unlimited 
expenditures. Even though but a small fraction 
of the youth of the town attend it, the influence, 
direct and indirect, of such a school will make it 
the wisest of investments, will bring in ample re- 
turns to the community in the social uplift, in the 
impulse toward good government, given to all the 
town. 

f But such a high school will not be merely a place 
for hearing lessons, for imparting certain con- 
ventional information, or for preparing boys and 
girls for college examinations. Its first purpose, 
its last purpose, its sole purpose will be develop- 
ment: will be the wisest possible bridging-over of 
the important period between childhood and man- 
hood, will be the turning of the irresponsible child 
into the responsible citizen. It will then always be 
a question, in the high school, not what the pupil 
learns, but what he becomes; not how he passes his 
examinations, but how he strengthens his character. 
The never-obscured aim of the rightly conducted 
high school should be wisely to confirm the in- 



DEMAND FOR CITIZENS' HIGH SCHOOL 189 

dividuality and the will of its pupils and thoroughly 
to establish a sense of social duty. Fortunately, 
there is no easier time in which to strengthen char- 
acter and to arouse a sense of social responsibility 
than in the very period of life with which the high 
school has to deal. Adolescence means tumult; 
but it means, also, that the social instinct is active, 
that altruism is marked, that attempts at personal 
perfection are readily stimulated. All the forces 
most needed in the making of a good citizen are at 
this age nearest the surface, most tractable, most 
teachable, if but right methods are taken to en- 
courage and to develop them. 

To utilize, however, these forces, to form character, 
to create out of the raw material of adolescence the 
fine flower of manhood and womanhood, demands 
a remodeling of the high school within and an 
awakening of the citizen without. It demands that 
this secondary school should be, in the eyes both of 
teachers and of citizens, the supreme social force of 
the town. This the high school, except in rarest 
instances, to-day is not; and because it is not the 
centre and fountain-head of citizenship, because, 
as a rule, it is simply a fitting school for college or a 
polishing school for a few boys and for many girls 
who, not needing to work, wish a genteel smatter- 
ing of culture, the attendance upon it is com- 



190 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

paratively so small and, in the eyes of many thought- 
ful persons, its results are so incommensurate with 
the large share of the public moneys which it ab- 
sorbs. Were the high school made a guiding force 
in the whole life of the town, were it to prove it- 
self an almost necessary agent in making boys and 
girls, not only into real citizens, but into effective 
workers, the attendance upon it would amazingly 
increase, and its action for individual good upon the 
pupils, its reaction for general good upon the citi- 
zens and the lower schools, would be far beyond 
the present. 

It is easy to deal in general statements and to 
draw from them equally vague conclusions; only 
those theories which can be translated into action 
are worth consideration. Therefore let us take up 
the three aspects of the case and determine what the 
high school should demand from the lower schools, 
from its own pupils, and from the citizens; and, in 
return, what influences for good it should exert upon 
those lower schools, upon those pupils of its own, 
and upon the community in which it is established. 

The high school which does its full duty to its 
town should set the educational standards for that 
town. Therefore it should rigorously exact from 
the lower schools pupils with the qualities and knowl- 
edge fundamental to good citizenship; it should de- 



DEMAND FOR CITIZENS' HIGH SCHOOL 191 

mand, that is, that the graduates of the elementary 
come to the high school able to read with fluency 
and understanding, able to write a clear, legible, 
handsome hand, able to speak or write their thoughts 
plainly and in order, thoroughly familiar with the 
four arithmetical processes and the principles of 
algebra, and with such an understanding of form 
and such a knowledge of its relations as are given 
by really educative work in plane geometry and in 
mechanical and freehand drawing. More than this, 
the high schools ought to demand from the ele- 
mentary schools pupils who are alert, active, quick, 
resourceful, with their powers of observation keenly 
alive, their desire to learn most eager, their mem- 
ories retentive and sure, their spirits daunted by no 
press of work, provided the work be fitted to their 
capacities and needs. The high schools have a 
right to demand all these things because they are 
the activities natural to children, activities which, 
if not discouraged or repressed, will continue far 
beyond school life. Therefore, if the child comes 
to the high school without these important qualities, 
it is, in the great majority of cases, not his fault, 
but that of the lower schools or of the home, upon 
which, jointly, rests the responsibility of preserving 
the normal child in that blessed state of eager, ac- 
quisitive growth in which the good God created him. 



192 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

The first step, then, in the improvement of the 
high school is to make the lower schools better by 
taking them out of politics, by putting experts in 
control of them, by requiring a professional educa- 
tion of and stimulating a professional pride in the 
teachers, by increasing the proportion of teachers 
to pupils, by abolishing the grading system, and, 
having done these things, by demanding then that 
there shall no longer be a waste of from one to three 
years in the school life of every average elementary 
pupil. 

For the sake of argument, however, let it be sup- 
posed that all its pupils, or a great majority of them, 
come to the high school either at an earlier age than 
now, or with most of the work of the first two high- 
school years already done. Suppose them, more- 
over, fuUy equipped with the tools of social life and 
possessing still that fund of inquisitiveness and ac* 
quisitiveness with which they were born. What 
has the high school a right to require from them in 
order that this school may do its full duty to the 
community and may justify its existence as a free 
institution.'* It has a right to demand that these 
pupils shall give themselves almost wholly to the 
school work, that this work shall be supreme, 
that it shall not be done and thought of only 
at such intervals as the pupils may snatch from 



DEMAND FOR CITIZENS' HIGH SCHOOL 193 

parties, theatres, and other distracting interests. 
The high school is a final opportunity given by 
the whole body of citizens to a certain few of 
its younger members to achieve a better citizen- 
ship; and it is a violation of a distinct obligation 
for these favored youth not to avail themselves 
to the full of this special privilege. Attentiveness, 
honest work, the major share of his thought 
and interest are all that the high school can 
demand from the pupil; but until it exacts and 
receives this it will not become, as it should, an 
effective social force. The second step in the im- 
provement of the high school, then, is to make it, 
to paraphrase an epigram of President Walker's, 
a place for young men and young women to work, 
not for boys and girls to play. The high-school 
day should be longer, the outlook of the school upon 
life should be more serious, its standards of attain- 
ment heightened, its scope broadened, its purpose 
deepened. Then would no longer be seen the ex- 
traordinary spectacle of the American people, with 
the best average mental endowment of all modern 
nations, exhibiting in many of its high-school 
graduates an immaturity of thought and a feeble- 
ness of purpose in marked contrast to the youth of 
like age in the British, German, and other Northern 
peoples, an immaturity and feebleness most in- 



194 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

imical to useful citizenship, and wholly unnecessary 
did the parents and schools but do their educational 
duty. 

In the third place, the high school ought to ask 
certain things from the citizens and to make it clear 
that its success depends upon their fulfilment of 
these conditions. It has a right to ask from parents 
that they shall act in harmony with the teachers, 
shall uphold them in every way, shall regard school- 
ing as a serious matter, and shall supplement in the 
home the scheme of education for citizenship which 
the school is following. It has a right to demand 
from the citizens in general that they shall em- 
phasize the importance of rightly conducted high- 
school work, shall further it in every way, shall 
encourage fit boys and girls to attend the school 
and to submit to its proper discipline, and shall deal 
as liberally with it as the means of the community 
and the not-to-be-neglected needs of the lower 
schools permit. And it has a right to demand from 
the voters that they shall select as their school 
representatives well-educated, fair-minded, broad- 
spirited men and women, who understand their 
duties to be mainly supervisory, and who will not 
try, therefore, to dictate in matters of education, 
where they are but ignorant amateurs and the 
teachers are, or ought to be, trained experts. The 



, DEMAND FOR CITIZENS' HIGH SCHOOL 195 

third step in the improvement of the high school is, 
then, to educate the public to regard it as a train- 
ing school for citizenship, to realize that the right 
education of a citizen is a business as important and 
as difficult as is the right education of a physician, 
to be willing to put that education wholly into the 
hands of experts, and to "back" those experts with 
parental authority, social support, and money. 

This ideal high school, having secured from the 
lower schools pupils who are properly trained in the 
mechanics of social intercourse, and from whom 
the freshness and bloom of eager, untiring youth 
have not been rubbed away; having persuaded those 
pupils and, more especially, their parents, that the 
high-school work is first, and not sixth or seventh, 
in importance in the daily life; having, furthermore, 
aroused the citizens in general to the true and limited 
functions of a school committee — what ought the 
community to expect from a high school so favored ? 
What, to reverse the inquiry that we have been 
making, ought the high school to do for the lower 
schools, for its own pupils, and for the citizens in 
general? 

To the lower schools such a perfected high school 
should be a guide and an inspiration. The forward 
impulse of education which is to keep it abreast 
with advancing civilization should come from the 



196 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

high school, that school leading the lower ones as 
the college ought to inspire it. As yet the high 
schools, far from appreciating the problems of the 
primary and grammar school, scarcely realize that 
such questions exist. They deal with their own 
pupils and courses as though the former had no past 
and the latter no foundations, seemingly oblivious 
to the fact that the problems of the high schools are 
bound up in those of the elementary schools and 
cannot be solved except as those of the primary and 
grammar schools are settled. And those earlier 
problems can be solved only by the aid of that 
knowledge of the older pupils and of their general 
aims and capacities which the high-school teacher 
alone can have. 

But the initiative in this cooperation must come 
from the high schools. They must realize (what the 
colleges are just beginning to appreciate) that every 
higher institution of learning must, for its own safety 
and right development, thoroughly understand and 
actively promote the work of all those below it. In 
much of the 'work of the elementary schools the 
high-school teachers, much to their own profit, might 
take direct part, by actual teaching, by showing how 
the preliminary lead to the higher studies, by making 
available there the books and apparatus with which 
every high school should be equipped. 



DEMAND FOR CITIZENS' HIGH SCHOOL 197 

But, more than this, the high-school teachers 
should advise with and learn from those of the ele- 
mentary schools, all grades of teachers regarding 
the public-school course as a connected whole, all 
meeting together for real discussion and mutual 
enlightenment, each one of them anxious to deal 
with every boy and girl, not piecemeal — not as a 
third-grade pupil or as a high-school freshman — 
but as an individual human being who during ten 
or twelve years is to be steadily and systematically 
developed by successive instructors, each of whom, 
as she takes that boy, is fully conversant with the 
work that he has done and with the work that he is 
going to do. Through this real cooperation of the 
teachers, not only would the high school immensely 
stimulate the entire public-school system, but it 
would, by making the pupils of the elementary schools 
see the coherence of all educational work, add largely 
to the number of children entering the high school. 
With such mutual understanding and cordial work- 
ing together, the high school would in time become 
the heart of the public-school system, instead of 
being, as it now too often is, an extraneous thing, 
little thought of by the average parent, little sought 
by the average pupil, and regarded with misgiving 
by many thoughtful citizens. 

For its own pupils the high school must do much 



iqs new demands in education 

more than to give them a smattering of a conven- 
tional list of languages, literature, mathematics, 
and the sciences. It must profoundly affect their life 
and stimulate their ideals. It takes them at a time 
when the social instinct is newly awakened, when, 
therefore, it is strong and undismayed by experience, 
when it is most easily guided and fixed in right 
directions. The sphere of the high school is pre- 
eminently one of social relationships and all its work 
must be emphasized In that direction. Moreover, 
in the four years of the high school the bent of the 
boy. If he have one, will be clearly shown to those 
who have eyes to see; and it Is the most extravagant 
waste of human forces if every effort is not made to 
perfect that boy as far as possible in the way toward 
which his nature points. Not only should he be 
made to understand and to feel, to the highest extent 
that his natural aptitudes permit, his privileges and 
his duties as a citizen of the State; not only should 
his physical, intellectual, and moral nature be pre- 
pared to the highest degree that any school can do 
it for the immense and solemn task which he has to 
undertake; but he should be helped in every possible 
way to make that task of right living an easy and a 
happy one, by having his education guided in the 
paths to which his aptitudes point, by giving him 
resources for his leisure and his elder years, by 



DEMAND FOR CITIZENS' HIGH SCHOOL 199 

grounding him in the eternal truths which alone 
make life worth the having. 

Therefore the work of the high school should be, 
as far as possible, individual; and in order that it 
may be individual it must be diversified. Almost 
every boy or girl who comes to the school is self- 
conscious, reserved, "offish," but is at the same time 
receptive to what is rightly given, docile when skil- 
fully led, eager for hero worship, whether the hero 
be found in the schoolroom or in books. Moreover, 
almost any youth, no matter how shy or indifferent, 
has some side of his nature that can be awakened, 
stimulated, and made a means to arouse the whole 
of him to the influence of education. Of these 
facts — for they are facts of psychology as well 
as of common experience — the good high-school 
teacher will avail himself; and, having, from his own 
observation as well as from consultation with the 
boy's earlier teachers, grasped the pupil's nature, 
will lead him, directly or indirectly, to those sub- 
jects which will most readily and fully arouse and 
stimulate. 

A foolish notion prevails that those who advocate 
election of studies in the high school mean that the 
boy shall choose haphazard; and the argument 
follows that he will, of course, choose what is easiest. 
Nothing could be farther from the truth. The 



I 



200 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

teacher, not the pupil, is really to make election, 
and the subjects chosen for the boy will not be those 
which are easiest to him, but those which meet the 
peculiar needs of his nature, those which answer — 
as certain foods best supply certain physical wants 
— the purposes of his fullest development. 

It is not at all essential that the graduate of a 
high school should have been taught a conventional 
list of topics; but it is vital, if he is to amount to 
anything as a man and as a citizen, that he shall 
have been really educated in the high school in such 
a way that he values knowledge, wishes to acquire 
more knowledge, realizes that education is power, 
and appreciates that the possession even of only a 
high-school education lays upon him peculiar ob- 
ligations of citizenship which he has no right to 
shirk. 

Finally, in the life of the community the secondary 
free school, if it is to justify itself by being a train- 
ing ground for citizenship, must become a much 
more vital factor than, in most cases, it now is. In 
conjunction with the public library it should be the 
town's intellectual centre. Its work and its lessons 
should by no means be confined to the pupils in 
attendance, but should reach out, first, as has been 
already stated, to the elementary schools, and then 
to all the people in the community. It should 



DEMAND FOR CITIZENS' HIGH SCHOOL 201 

carry on work analogous to that of university ex- 
tension by providing courses of lectures, by organiz- 
ing classes for adults, by encouraging its teachers to 
lead in everything which makes for the best social 
and intellectual progress of the town. Not at all 
satisfied with giving lessons for Hve hours a day to a 
comparatively few young men and women, it should 
carry on its teachings, directly or indirectly, through 
the whole of every day of the week, 'encouraging, 
stimulating, and leading the entire community to a 
higher mental and social life. 



CHAPTER XIII 

HOW THE COLLEGES RUIN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 

IT SEEMS superfluous to argue that the average 
high school is, in large degree, a failure. It is 
a lamentable fact to be acknowledged and faced, 
a fact demonstrated by the small number of grad- 
uates, by the preponderance of girls among those 
graduates, and by the present widespread and well- 
founded agitation to stop the economic and moral 
waste of youth between fourteen and eighteen years 
of age. 

I have no wish, however, to add my jeremiad to the 
already loud chorus that the high schools are not 
doing their work, such as it is, in a satisfactory way. 
Within their limits these schools are producing better 
and more lasting results than ever before. What I 
do purpose to criticise is those limits themselves; and 
in doing that I find fault, not with the high-school 
masters, but with the public and with the univer- 
sities. 

The high school fails because, having been created 
to give intellectual, moral, and industrial sustenance 



COLLEGES RUIN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 203 

to the people, it has been commandeered to feed the 
colleges; it fails because, having been established as 
the crown of the common school, it has become the 
tail of the university kite; it fails because, having 
been subsidized to solve the complex educational 
problems of adolescence, it has, in large part, wasted 
its energies upon cramming a few pupils for the 
artificial, and often outrageous, demands of college- 
entrance papers. 

The people would not sanction the relatively 
enormous expense of high schools did they not be- 
lieve that, by making secondary education free, 
they are giving every boy and girl the best possible 
guidance through the critical years of early adoles- 
cence. They *' sense" the fact that, could these 
years be rightly treated educationally, the saving 
to the State in money, the gain to the world in lives 
and characters, would far outweigh the cost. In not 
meeting this expectation, in neglecting years ago to 
grapple with the most vital of all school problems — 
that of holding a majority of youth in school in order 
to prepare them for their highest usefulness as citi- 
zens and workers — the high school has failed to 
meet the most urgent need of every American com- 
munity. 

The creating of free high schools killed, in most 
instances, the old academies. Thus were cut off 



204 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

the main feeders of the colleges, the chief places in 
which the children of the doctor, the lawyer, and the 
other leading citizens might fit. These leading 
citizens, as a rule, were elected to the school com- 
mittees; and, when the colleges demanded, by their 
examinations, certain standards and methods of 
teaching, it followed naturally, and without any 
shadow of conspiracy on the part of any one, that 
the high schools became, and in most instances have 
remained, fitting schools for the nearest university. 
As most communities are too poor to provide more 
than one course of study, that one governed by the 
cramming needs of half a dozen college-preparatory 
pupils was made to determine the educational 
atmosphere and fix the mental boundaries for the 
hundred others who have no faintest notion of 
entering a college. Moreover, in thus crystallizing 
along university-made lines, the high school really 
prescribes college-preparatory work and methods 
for the grammar and primary schools; for, through 
the successive elementary years, the eighth or ninth 
grade child must have acquired just that cut-and- 
dried information, just that type of examinable mind, 
which shall admit, first to the high school and then 
to the university. All this has been done, and is 
being done, in face of the fact that only about lo 
per cent, (to put the figure high) of a community's 



COLLEGES RUIN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 205 

children graduate from the high school, and that only 
2 or 3 per cent, ever go to the colleges which thus 
overshadow the whole public-school system. 

I say "overshadow" advisedly, for under the very 
same conditions it would have been easily possible 
for the colleges — had they viewed education 
broadly Instead of narrowly, democratically instead 
of aristocratically — to flood the whole school course 
with educational sunshine by exacting only such 
standards of achievement as would be truly educa- 
tive, really developing, and ceaselessly stimulating 
to the pupils of the grammar and high schools. As 
it is, however, shadow is too mild a word; the col- 
lege-entrance examination is an incubus which stunts 
the lives and limits the careers of hundreds of thou- 
sands of children, and which keeps teachers at 
educational stone-breaking when they ought to be, 
and when so many of them would like to be, mold- 
ing, and expanding, and Illuminating human lives. 
But from this obsession schools and teachers cannot 
escape so long as the public finds its satisfaction — 
as most communities do — in boasting, not how 
much Its high school Is doing for the ninety-seven 
children to whom that is the end and crown of their 
school work, but how well it fits three pupils for 
Harvard, Yale, or Smith. 

The high school fails, then, to serve the com- 



2o6 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

munity needs because, thus far, it has hardly tried 
to meet the real requirements of more than a thirtieth 
of its rightful constituency, and because it has not 
given even to that collegiate 3 per cent, what it is 
good for them, intellectually and morally, to have. 

The adolescent needs hard work (provided it be 
not exclusively head work) and strong discipline; 
but in the collegiate shadow which is more and more 
creeping over the secondary school, aided by the 
foolishness of parents in encouraging the notion that 
school work is unimportant as compared with home 
demands, social life, fraternities, or athletics, the 
high-school youth has much leisure, much irregu- 
larity of supervision, much time to roam the streets, 
and no definite pressure as to when and how he 
shall perform his work. 

The adolescent needs much physical steadying 
and many interesting and absorbing occupations 
to counteract the clamorings of newly awakened 
interests and passions; but, under the sedentary 
lecture and recitation system made necessary, if he 
is to be duly fattened for the college-examination 
shambles, the physical side of his education — unless 
it be through interscholastic games which, by send- 
ing promising athletic material to the colleges, give 
the preparatory school an enviable reputation — is 
practically neglected; and, as for interest and variety, 



COLLEGES RUIN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 207 

what could taboo and destroy both more effectually 
than the rigid and rigorous demands of a formal set 
of examinations prepared, as a rule, by pedantic 
specialists who know practically nothing of the fun- 
damental problems and needs of the high school? 

The adolescent, just on the threshold of society, 
ought to prepare for social living, to try his powers on 
a small scale, to develop his individuality, to learn 
how to get on with others, to foresee and foreknow 
the demands of that social and industrial world 
which is to be the medium of his whole subsequent 
career. But this kind of education, not being 
examinable, is substantially ruled out. Most of 
this essential training could be given through the 
present high-school studies were those not taught 
almost solely for examination ends. How much real 
discipline and education, for example, a boy might 
derive from Greek and Latin were they presented 
as a revelation of Greek and Roman life; but how 
less than nothing the youth does get out of that 
potential well-spring when his daily work is ground 
down to the grammar, to the intricacies of indirect 
discourse, to the bad English of prose translations 
and the worse Latin of alleged versification! How 
much good the high-school pupil might imbibe from 
history were it made a living picture of the progress 
and aims of human society, of the splendid upward 



2oS NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

sweep of civilization; but how little he does derive 
from either ancient or modern history when the 
teacher knows, and he knows, that what he will be 
examined upon is the biography of this king, the plan 
of that battle, and the chronology of certain outward 
events which are but the merest froth upon the deep, 
wide stream of human development! How much 
the secondary-school youth might learn from the 
elementary sciences were they made, as they can 
be made, a revelation of the power and wisdom of 
nature, of the correlation of forces, and of the laws of 
evolution; but how futile is the mind-stuff that comes 
from performing a series of mummified experiments 
in two or three apparently unrelated sciences ! How 
splendidly at sixteen and eighteen years of age the 
great English heritage of romantic, poetic, dramatic, 
and historic literature might be used to inspire 
visions of noble achievement, to stimulate the 
innate aspirations of adolescence toward high and 
fine ideals; and how absolutely all these lofty things 
of life, these precious dreams of early youth, are 
destroyed by doling out, solely for examination 
purposes, such literary sawdust as Burke's "Speech 
on Conciliation" and the "Ancient Mariner!" 

The adolescent needs to believe, if he is to submit 
to formal education at all, that what he is doing in 
the high school is of some ultimate service, that he 



COLLEGES RUIN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 209 

is getting ready to take his place as an active worker 
and a real factor in the world. He feels his budding 
powers and he wants to exercise them; he begins to 
apprehend the meaning of citizenship, and he wants 
to be getting ready to be a citizen; he begins to com- 
prehend money, and desires to shape his powers 
toward earning for himself and for that family which 
is to be. All these motives are natural and right, 
and should be ceaselessly availed of in the secondary 
school. But one cannot persuade a youth that the 
subjects in the college catalogue, desiccated for 
examination purposes, are leading toward these 
proper and interesting ends. One cannot honestly 
persuade himself that these things, thus taught, will 
really be of lasting educational use. The formal dis- 
cipline involved has, of course, its value, but it is 
only one of the smallest factors in the real develop- 
ment and training of the adolescent youth. Can 
we successfully maintain that, beyond formal dis- 
cipline, the painful groping into the meanings of 
Caesar, the committing to memory of the rules and 
exceptions of an utterly dead language, the rehears- 
ing of the strategy of barbaric battles, the working 
out of surds and simultaneous equations, the hunt- 
ing down of Macaulay's pedantic allusions, the doing, 
substantially by rote, of a few meagre experiments 
in chemistry and physics, really prepare a boy to go 



2IO NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

out at eighteen intellectually, physically, and morally 
ready to make the most of himself in the social and 
industrial world? 

The high school fails because it treats the living 
organism of the real boy and girl, the living organism 
of the school society, as a dead machine to be handled 
by mechanical means. It fails because, like the 
Chinese, it bows down to the sacred things of tradi- 
tion as embodied in the wooden tests, stupidly — 
and, I venture to say, ignorantly — imposed by col- 
lege authorities w^ho, desiring some kind of sieve 
through which to strain their applicants, have not 
in the least concerned themselves with the effects 
of that straining process upon the whole develop- 
ment of education, and, therefore, upon the very 
existence of modern society. 

The high schools will continue to fail just so long 
as they are particeps criminis in this needless slaugh- 
ter of the adolescent. Every high-school boy is a 
problem by himself; and the business of the high 
school is to develop him, as an individual, to his 
highest possible usefulness as a man and as a citizen. 
To be so developed, he must, in the first place, be 
disciplined by hard, serious, steady work; to do that 
hard work he must be interested in it; and, to be 
interested in it, he must himself see that it Is going 
to be of use. A boy will care for and develop his 



COLLEGES RUIN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 211 

body eagerly if he be permitted to do so naturally 
through gymnastics, manual and industrial work, 
through making things and building things in free 
companionship with other boys. He will suffer 
gladly even such fools as he regards the Greeks and 
Trojans if he be made to see that they were real 
people who once lived and with whom our modern 
problems are all Intertwined. He will rejoice in, 
instead of hating, literature, if he be permitted to 
plunge into it as into a splendid bath of inspiration, 
instead of being required to dig Into it, as with a 
muck-rake, for the worthless odds and ends of a 
pedantic examination. He will find nature the great 
storehouse of inspiration that she is if he be allowed 
to investigate through this science and through that, 
instead of being compelled to perform forty set ex- 
periments in fifteen weeks. He v/ill like. Instead of 
hating, mathematics if, all the time, he is being 
shown how its divisions fit into one another and into 
daily life and work. And he will perform almost 
any kind of necessary drudgery provided he be con- 
vinced that, by doing this drudgery well, he is laying 
the lasting foundations of his future career. 

For their ov/n sakes and for that of the helpless 
children under them, the great body of secondary 
teachers should say to the colleges : 

"For these many years v/e have adapted our 



212 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

standards and our courses to your entrance require- 
ments, set with no knowledge and with no thought 
of what we could or ought to accomplish. Although 
we have tried to carry on special courses for those 
pupils who were not to go to college, your demands 
have really set the pace and created the atmosphere 
for all our schools. Our boys and girls have had to 
be single-molded to your arbitrary standards; in 
future, your standards must be many-molded to 
our boys and girls. We propose to develop every 
pupil in the way that is best for him alone; your work, 
like ours, must be diversified and humanized to carry 
along the same process of development; therefore 
your examinations — or, better still, your standards 
of achievement to be determined otherwise than 
through examinations — must be made wide in range 
and flexible in combination so that our boys and 
girls may keep their thoughts solely upon our re- 
quirements, not mainly upon yours." 

Not until they have thrown oflp the incubus of the 
present absurd college requirements will the high 
schools be able to begin to work out the problem 
— ' the hardest in education — which is especially 
theirs. That problem is how to educate children 
to be true citizens and effective workers; for, in 
the four years of the high-school course, the great 
development out of irresponsibility into responsi- 



COLLEGES RUIN THE HIGH SCHOOLS 213 

bility ought to have taken place; and the child, sub- 
ject to others' wills and swayed by others' thoughts, 
should have grown, during those four years, into 
the young man with his own will active, his own 
thoughts busy, his own powers disciplined, ready and 
eager for the splendid fight of life. Until the high 
schools have begun to make themselves a powerful 
social force instead of a mill for examination grinding, 
they will continue to fail to meet the real and crying 
needs of the community. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 

MOST savage races surround the physical 
coming of age of their young men with elab- 
orate and striking ceremonies. Through 
solemn rites and severe tests of his endurance the 
youth is transferred from the tutelage of women to 
that of men, and is by them inducted into virile ways. 
The Greeks, the Romans, and the Feudal peoples, 
inheriting these primitive ceremonies, softened them 
in form, but left them practically unchanged in 
substance. Our ancestors, from that composite of 
actualities, the typical savage, to that poetic myth, 
King Arthur, properly regarded puberty as a great 
event and adolescence as a time for solemn teaching 
by those highest in spiritual rank. 

We, however, with a physical and moral life far 
more complex than that of our savage or mediaeval 
forebears, leave this tremendous physiological change 
and its mental and moral sequelae to the blind guid- 
ance of chance, viewing with indifference or even 
with ribaldry this "second birth" of the child, and 

214 



THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 215 

abandoning the nascent man, at the best to the tui- 
tion of unmarried women, and at the worst to the 
teaching of foul-minded loafers. 

Comparing the elaborate moral training of the 
feudal page or even of the youthful savage (remem- 
bering, of course, that ethical standards are always 
relative and always in flux) with the almost purely 
memoriter teaching of the modern high-school boy, 
one is inclined to ask if we have not forsaken the 
substance for the shadow in educational things. In 
many, if not in most, schoolrooms have we not for- 
gotten — what even the aborigines knew — that the 
most immediate and serious of school problems Is 
that of moral discipline? Have we not overlooked 
the plain fact that the main energies of society, so 
far as they relate to the high-school boy, should be 
concentred, not on preparing him for a set of college 
examinations, not on getting him ready to earn his 
living, but on carrying him safely through the most 
serious and far-reaching evolution of his entire life? 
The donning of long trousers, viewed as a symbol 
of physiological and moral change, is really the most 
significant event in life. 

To the mere hearer of lessons all schoolboys — 
except for their physiognomies or their degrees of 
cleanliness — are substantially alike. And it is true 
that the average boy, ranging from the incorrigible 



2i6 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

"dig" to the incorrigible mischief-maker, does ex- 
hibit certain fundamental qualities common to the 
entire adolescent tribe. During the whole or a part 
of the period betv/een thirteen and twenty all normal, 
healthy boys present, in greater or less degree, the 
folio v/ing characteristics : 

(i) Great physical activity, alternating with 
periods of marked physical lassitude, misnamed 
"laziness." 

(2) Unusual physical and mental restlessness. 

(3) A marked spirit of self-assertion, of combat- 
iveness, of "contrariness." 

(4) A sudden increase in the social instinct, 
developing into what has well been called the 
"gang-spirit," the herding of boys into predatory 
or mischief-making "gangs." 

(5) An intense curiosity, combined with an 
extraordinary reserve; a bluffness of manner that 
conceals, however, an unusual secretiveness. 

(6) A rapid awakening of the consciousness of 
individuality, a sudden realization of the Ego, which 
sometimes results in intense selfishness and almost 
always manifests itself In heedlessness and self- 
absorption, and 

(7) As a result of all these other things, a notable 
phase, greater or less in duration, of religious ecstasy. 



THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 217 

These common and basic characteristics, howeverj 
appear in such differing degrees and in such a variety 
of combinations that they cannot be dealt with in 
the mass or by preordained methods and rules. Each 
boy is a problem by himself; and the chief business 
of any community is, through its parents, its teachers, 
and its citizens in general, to bring to a fortunate 
solution the particular equation of each separate 
youth. 

Taking up these fundamental phases in detail, the 
first characteristic — great physical activity — is 
made necessary, of course, by the rapid development 
of the youth, a growth that demands much food, 
that creates much waste, and that necessitates ex- 
traordinary physical exertion in order for the food to 
be assimilated and the wastes to be throv/n off. All 
this, however, means nervous strain, nervous ex- 
haustion, and, in too many cases, nervous derange- 
ment if the lassitude which Indicates diminution of 
nervous vitality is treated as mere laziness. To meet 
these conditions the boy must have an abundance 
of the right sort of exercise, in the open air; but this 
exercise must be so regulated that, in his youthful 
exuberance, he does not permanently exhaust his 
nervous force. And as brain exhaustion is even more 
dangerous, we must be ever on the lookout to see if 
schoolboy laziness be not the danger-signal put out 



2i8 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

by a tired brain to warn against overpressure in the 
school. Were girls under consideration, there would 
be need of even more emphatic warning. 

This question of nervous strain and nervous ex- 
haustion is, of course, intimately connected with 
what I have called the second characteristic of the 
growing boy, that physical and mental restlessness 
(mark the distinction between restlessness and ac- 
tivity) which is due, in great measure, to sexual 
development. The results of this restlessness, in 
peevishness, in Impertinence, In inattention. In the 
not-seldom appalling obscenity of schoolboys, and 
in physical acts which sometimes do lasting damage, 
constitute one of the most serious problems with 
which teachers and parents are called upon to deal. 
It Is a pathological phenomenon for which one must 
be always on the watch, and against which one must 
be ever guarding by giving the boy a wide variety 
of absorbing interests, by seeing to it that his idle 
hours are few and far between, by making him so 
soundly tired every night that he goes to sleep In- 
stantly and stays asleep till he Is dragged from his 
pillow; above all, by keeping his stomach well filled 
with digestible, not overstlmulating, food, and his 
heart and brain well nurtured with moral ideals and 
lofty aspirations. 

The third characteristic — the spirit of self- 



THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 219 

assertion, of desire to be a man — shows itself in 
well-known forms. Physically it exhibits itself in 
punching other boys' heads, in sparring, wrestling, 
and a general puppyishness that often stretches one's 
patience to the breaking point. Mentally it shows 
itself in covert or open defiance of parental and 
school authority, In a variety of "larks" and petty 
rebellions needing careful handling, and in the setting 
up of an ethical code that may or may not be like 
ours, but which the average boy will obey even 
though he incur severe punishment for doing so. 
Another form of this self-assertion is the assumption 
of the so-called manly habits of swearing, smoking, 
drinking, etc. 

But this self-assertiveness, this setting-up 01 a 
moral code of his own, this assuming of a manliness 
that is new and strange to him, would be impossible 
to the ordinary boy If he had to do it individually. 
The only way In which he can bolster up his courage 
is to lean on other boys like-minded with himself. 
Hence arises the "gang," the herding of boys to- 
gether under one or more leaders, the strengthening, 
through this mutual support, of whatever good, and 
also of whatever evil. Instincts each of the Individuals 
may have. In this connection every one having to do 
with youth ought to make use of that force so potent 
for good and evil in the world, the spirit of the crowd. 



220 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

A fifth characteristic of the growing boy is intense 
curiosity united with extraordinary reserve, a show 
of bluntness that is really a mask for great secretive- 
ness. Especially is he curious about questions of life 
and human relationship, for he dimly feels that these 
are soon vitally to concern him. I am convinced 
that the boy of even ordinary intellect and imagina- 
tion is continually speculating about life in his own 
queer, ignorant way; and, since his experience is 
limited, he is free to build up, and does build up, 
the most extraordinary explanations of the simplest 
phenomena. Having seen so many (to him) miracu- 
lous things in his short career, he has no difficulty 
in imagining other even more marvellous happenings. 
Like those Europeans, when the rest of the world was 
practically unknown, who found no trouble in be- 
lieving accounts of monsters and of "men whose 
heads do grow beneath their shoulders," this boy is 
unastonished by almost any wonder. As a result 
many youths entertain, even up to manhood, the 
most outlandish explanations of the most common- 
place affairs. A word would have set them right; 
but, unfortunately, it is very seldom that the en- 
lightening word happens to be spoken. So, not 
being sure of themselves, and having found out, 
through bitter experience, that their elders are only 
too ready to laugh at their mistakes and to ridicule 



THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 221 

their most innocent questions; filled, moreover, with 
the desire to appear as experienced men of the world, 
these boys keep their remarkable speculations to 
themselves and assume, generally with great suc- 
cess, an air of supreme Indifference to matters about 
v/hich, In fact, they are consumed with curiosity. 

Another reason, It seems to me, for the secretive- 
ness of boys Is their extreme, often their abnormal, 
modesty. To those who have had much to do with 
boys, it may seem paradoxical to call the average 
foul-speaking urchin modest; nevertheless, I believe 
that — of course with many exceptions — the aver- 
age boy, because of his greater Immaturity, because 
of his Inherent chivalry, is more modest, more sensi- 
tive, more horror-struck at real indecency than Is the 
average young girl. 

After having asserted that this high-school period 
is characterized by the gang spirit, it seems like a 
contradiction to speak of It also as a time of indi- 
viduality and of self-realization. The contradiction, 
however. Is only apparent. There is no clear cogni- 
tion of the Ego In childhood until the development 
of the conscious will; as this time usually just pre- 
cedes the high-school period, it is clear that there 
must be a strong development then of the sense of 
individuality. The "gang" arises because that Ego 
wishes to strengthen Itself by associating with other 



222 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

Individualities at a similar stage of development; 
and this awakening of the Ego is the golden hour for 
making something out of the boy, for setting him 
straight on whatever may be the best road toward 
his highest usefulness. 

Having, then, this self-realization, this nervous 
restlessness, this curiosity, this love of the mysterious, 
this readiness to accept the miraculous, this tingling 
of his whole being from the tremendous changes go- 
ing on within; possessing, moreover, this gang spirit 
which makes the boy yearn for the support of others, 
it follows that there must come to most youth, as 
Indeed there does at this time, some form of moral 
ecstasy. This usually takes the shape of a so-called 
religious experience in that church with which, 
through his parents or friends, the boy may be 
brought into association. This phase Is so generally 
looked for that churches make their preparations for 
bringing young men and women within their In- 
fluence just at this time; and most fortunate It Is 
that there stand at the gate, as the boy goes from 
childhood to manhood, these priests and ministers 
eager to meet him and lead him within the shelter 
and influence of organized morality. If this religious 
phase in youth prove genuine and permanent. It Is 
the most fortunate experience through which he 
could have gone. Even though transient, It may do 



THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 223 

real and lasting good. There is danger, however, as 
with all deep emotions, that reaction will follow and 
that the youth will be left emotionally sated, and 
disgusted, therefore, for the rest of his life with 
religion and all that it implies. 

It is clear, then, that in this transition period we 
have the boy, physically, mentally and morally, in 
the most susceptible and most impressionable, the 
most teachable, and consequently in the most mo- 
mentous, era of his entire life. Unfortunately, how- 
ever, he is almost as susceptible to evil as to good, and 
bad examples make just as strong impressions as good 
ones. Teaching, therefore, if it be wrongly done, 
will hurt this teachable boy far more than it will 
help. At this time, more than ever before or after 
in his life, the boy needs help and explanation, needs 
sympathy and understanding, needs, as the Greeks 
so wisely saw, the firm, kind guidance of an older 
man. Ignorant, weak, bewildered by the vast life 
which is opening before him, the boy may be swept 
off his feet and engulfed in immorality and sin almost 
before he knows what sin and immorality are; cer- 
tainly before he has any conception of their awful 
and inevitable punishment. To make no provision, 
therefore, for moral training at this crucial time is to 
commit an unpardonable sin against humanity. 

Having examined the first part of our problem, 



224 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

the boy himself, let us look at the second element, 
the boy's environment. That part of the problem 
has three factors — society in general, the limited 
society called home, and the artificial society called 
school. As to society In general, a glance back into 
our own lives is sufficient to indicate what a be- 
wildering impression its moral and social aspects 
make upon the growing boy. It is an eft'ect just as 
confusing to him as are physical phenomena to the 
newborn child. The Infant has to learn the leading 
facts of physical existence slowly and carefully, 
under the protection and leading of his mother or 
nurse. In very much the same way the boy has to 
learn the facts and truths of moral existence; and 
there is just as much need here, as in the other case, 
of guidance. For the social order is carried on for 
men and women, not for boys and girls; and if the 
latter get contamination from It, the fault lies with 
those around them, not Math society itself. The 
churches, the Sunday schools, the Christian asso- 
ciations established for the purpose of helping these 
helpless learners in the school of life, do, of course, 
much good work; but society, in its ordinary course, 
is not managed by these moral agencies. When one 
speaks of society he means the streets, the shops, 
the newspapers, the theatres, the thousand social 
forces which appeal to the boy, not simply on Sun- 



THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 225 

day, not alone on the lecture evening of the Y. M. 
C. A., not merely when some zealous man gets hold 
of him and gives him an hour of good advice — they 
are forces that appeal to him, that mightily interest 
him, that rapidly educate him during every waking 
hour of the full seven days. None can remake 
society In a year or even In a generation. It must 
be taken about as one finds It, and, as an educational 
agency, one finds It, as a rule, pretty bad. Certainly 
the newspapers, which are, cry out against them as 
v/e may, a fairly just mirror of society, do not give 
any great moral uplift. Certainly the streets of a 
city after dark are not model schools of ethics. And 
there are few more conspicuous perverters of youth 
than the average country store. Indeed, mutatis 
mutandis, a rural community is a more dangerous 
place for a growing boy than Is a city street. 

These aspects of social life are so familiar to adults 
that we no longer really see them; having long ago 
learned their littleness and folly in comparison with 
what Is worth while in life, they have almost no in- 
fluence upon us, we have acquired, through ex- 
perience, such a nice sense of ethical values that this 
flaunting of nastiness and vice leaves us substantially 
untouched. But how is it with the developing boy 
who Is as Ignorant of real moral values as the new- 
born infant is of true physical relations? How 



226 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

puzzling, how morally topsy-turvy, how suggestive 
of all manner of queer conclusions this Vanity Fair 
around the boy must be! How strange to him it is 
we cannot know, excepting as we may be able to 
grope back into our own memories; and how he Inter- 
prets it he never will tell. Knowing, however, the 
general characteristics of this time of life, we may 
make an attempt to guess. Physically exuberant as 
the average healthy boy is, the accounts in the news- 
papers of prize fights, of those larger prize fights 
called battles, of everything that concerns the so- 
called strenuous life, v/ill interest him immensely; 
and, under some sort of guidance as to what is manly 
and what is not, it is very well that he should be so 
interested. But that searching restlessness of his, 
that strange pruriency of his time of life, will find 
other things in those papers, will hear other things 
in men's conversation, will seek out things in classic 
literature that his ignorance (or his worse than igno- 
rance picked up from dirty-minded companions) 
will turn and twist and magnify and speculate upon 
until there may spring up in his mind, like some 
horrid fungus, such a mass of vague obscenity as 
will gradually drive out all better thoughts. This 
garbage of social existence means so little to us that 
it is difficult to realize how Its stench may fill the 
nostrils and stupefy the morals of those silent boys 



THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 227 

who seem to us so innocent and so indifferent to evil 
happenings. 

It Is evident, then, that not much good education 
for the boy — in the real meaning of education — 
can be expected from the community at large. It is 
true that society, by its demands upon him, teaches 
him, in a rough and ready fashion, social manners; 
by knocking him about. It gives him self-reliance, 
ready wit, and a kind of savoir faire. Of moral 
education, however, it will give him very little 
indeed; lucky for him if he does not get from it, in- 
stead, an m-moral education. For his ethical train- 
ing the boy must look to his home, to his school and, 
if he have one, to his church. 

So we come to the second factor of the second 
element of our problem — the boy's home. Of the 
uplift of the atmosphere of a good home one cannot 
say too much in eulogy; but how large a proportion 
of homes, even in that great middle-class which is 
the heart and soul of the country, can be called, in 
that sense, good homes? And in how many, even 
of the good homes, are the peculiar wants of the 
growing lad in any great degree met? The boy 
needs, as has been said, much outdoor exercise, 
judiciously supervised in order that he may not over- 
tax his nervous system; but what parent knows 
much, if anything, about the son's sports and games ? 



2 28 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

The father will probably encourage, the mother will 
sighingly acquiesce in, football, baseball, swimming, 
and kindred exercises; but how and with whom the 
son follows those sports, whether he is developing his 
body rightly or wrongly, whether or not he even 
knows how to play so that sport will be one of the 
best parts of his education, the mother wots little 
and the father less. 

Again, the physical and mental restlessness of a 
pubescent boy needs to be stilled by giving him a 
host of different interests that will divert his mind 
and absorb his attention; but do many fathers and 
mothers sec In the collecting mania, in the printing- 
press mania, in the trading mania, in the forty other 
manias of this period of life anything but another 
instance of boyish foolishness and fondness for mak- 
ing a "clutter?" Collecting, however, and all the 
rest of the supposedly useless channels Into which a 
growing boy's interests run are plainly beneficent 
provisions of an all-wise Providence. 

Furthermore, how does the average parent — even 
the good one — deal with the assertlveness, the 
bumptiousness, the "contrariness" of the pubescent 
boy, all of these attributes being the clearest signals 
of his struggle out of childhood Into manhood.^ It 
Is to be feared that to most households the boy's 
noise, his muddy boots, his hectoring manner, his 



THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 229 

tendency to fall over himself and everything else, 
his heedlessness, his self-absorption, are so painfully 
conspicuous that the real, loving, yearning, shrinking 
boy-soul behind It all is but seldom recognized. 
Therefore, most families breathe a sigh of relief when, 
after silently gulping his food or loudly tormenting 
his sisters, the poor, misunderstood hobbledehoy 
slams the front door and goes to join his own par- 
ticular gang, there to be led, by some more masterful 
youth. Into simple mischief or into serious evil. 

As to the intense curiosity of the developing boy, 
not simply In regard to those topics foolishly called 
forbidden, but also concerning all the great funda- 
mental facts of life, how fully do even conscientious 
fathers and mothers do their duty along these im- 
portant lines? Half the misery and sin in the world 
comes from parental Ignorance, parental reticence, 
parental cowardice in regard to matters of infinitely 
more moment than all the Latin and history and al- 
gebra lessons in the boy's whole curriculum. It is 
difficult to talk with a boy about these intimate 
questions; It is impossible to do so unless for long 
years one has been getting that boy's confidence and 
winning his close comradeship. To keep aloof from 
a boy for fourteen years and then to talk to him 
about such matters Is simply to disgust him. One 
must have begun to prepare for that conversation 



23© NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

at least twelve years before. But it is better to run 
the risk even of misunderstanding than to play that 
cowardly part which it is to be feared most parents 
take of letting the boy learn from the streets, of let- 
ting him painfully and distortedly puzzle out from 
his own observation, or of letting him remain in a 
sort of prurient ignorance v/hich they are pleased to 
regard as innocence. 

The religious crisis of this transition period is a 
difhcult and obscure problem. The churches are 
trying to solve it; of late years their efforts seem to 
have been wiser and, therefore, more successful. 
But they will not accomplish all they can until they 
find means of inducing stronger men to take up 
theology and until they can devise ways of giving 
their teachers of youth, whether in the pulpit or in 
the Sunday school, as complete a training in the 
principles and practices of education as is given to 
the very best teachers in the secular schools. It is a 
difficult science and art, this teaching of algebra and 
history; how vastly more difficult is the teaching, 
with any hope of results, of the eternal truths of 
righteous living. 

It would appear, then, that of the three agencies 
most nearly concerned in the education of the high- 
school boy, the community can do little good, and 
may do very much bad, teaching. It would seem, 



THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 231 

too, that until parents have grown wiser and more 
conscientious, they cannot or will not do a hundredth 
part of what they might and ought toward helping 
the boy rightly over this most difficult period of a 
man's whole life. Therefore, as usual, it devolves 
upon the already overburdened school to do what it 
can to solve this most important problem of human 
education. 

One cannot begin the moral training of boys in the 
high school if that training has not been properly 
started far down in the lower schools. If a boy have 
not sound instincts and tolerably clear notions of 
right and wrong at fourteen, it is hopeless for the 
secondary school to try then to get much hold upon 
him. It will be agreed, too, that the high-school 
teacher can do little or nothing in this direction unless 
the number of pupils whom he is to influence is so 
small that he can know every boy way down to the 
bottom of that pupil's soul. Moreover, since the 
streets are not good places in which to obtain moral 
education, since the boy's home, as a rule, is only a 
little more efficient than the streets, it follows that 
the school should hold him as long and as steadily 
as it possibly can. For that reason I would advocate 
all-day sessions for the high school with at least a 
half-day's work on Saturday. In this lengthened 
day, however, there should be many recesses; its 



232 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

afternoons should be given up to manual work, 
drawing, gymnastics, and similar kinds of education; 
and in school, not at home, the boy should each day 
learn his lessons for the next. There is no better 
training for the growing will than the right learning 
of a hard lesson; there is no more harmful influence, 
physically, mentally and morally, upon a boy than 
that which comes from sitting late into the evening 
over a task that he does not understand, that he has 
not the slightest idea how to attack, and that arouses 
in him all the evil forces of rebellion, of a wandering 
mind, of an unhappy solitude. Let the school be 
the main business of the boy's life; but, like every 
wise business man, let him leave his cares behind 
him when he shuts his desk. 

Let us now return to the main characteristics of the 
growing boy and see what suggestions they may 
hold toward the solution of this problem of moral 
education in the secondary school. First, there was 
a boy's great physical activity. This means that we 
must have pure air in the schoolroom and plenty of 
it; that we must have frequent recesses, each long 
enough for the boy to get out of doors and run; that 
we may find it to be the teacher's duty (since parents 
will not assume it) to advise concerning and In a 
I measure to oversee the pupils' games. It certainly 
means that we must make sure that every boy among 



THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 233 

them exercises just as hard and just as much as his 
individual constitution may permit. As to the lassi- 
tude characteristic of this time of life, It should be 
carefully watched so that, if there be nerve strain, 
the cause of it may be discovered and, If possible, 
removed. 

Secondly, as to the restlessness of the growing boy, 
this restlessness which is due not so much to growing 
muscles as to dawning puberty: does its presence 
not suggest several things? First, that we deal 
cautiously with inattention, with irritability, with 
the "fidgets"; secondly, that we do everything in 
our power to give every boy many and wide inter- 
ests, both In and out of school; and, thirdly, does not 
this need of absorption In things outside himself 
point straight toward the elective system in the 
high school, a system that will permit each boy, 
within supervised limits, to follow those topics in 
which he is really Interested? Such a system, right- 
ly carried on, is one of the greatest of moral safe- 
guards. 

.Next, as to those extremely disagreeable qualities 
in youth — his self-assertiveness, his arrogance, his 
scorn of his teacher and of everybody else, his "can- 
tankerousness." These sharp-cornered stones of 
his character which we builders would so like to 
reject, may be made, on the contrary, the very head 



234 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

of the corner In the boy's education. For it is these 
qualities which will most quickly respond to any 
moral appeal. If that appeal be wrongly made, 
these qualities will all rise up in rebellion against it; 
if it be rightly made, every one will be a stout ally 
to make the work of the teacher fruitful and endur- 
ing. If the boy show the self-assertion which he 
calls manliness, then let him prove himself a man 
by cultivating really manly qualities. If he love 
argument, argue with him, but in the Socratic man- 
ner, so that he may prove out of his own mouth 
the truth. If he would be masterful, overbearing, 
pugnacious, put him in charge of weaker or smaller 
boys, making him responsible for their safety and 
right doing. Unknown to him those wards of his 
will protect him far more then he will them.^ 

As to moral teaching in the narrower sense in 
which it is generally used, much more can be done 
than would at first appear. The reading of passages 
from the Bible, if wisely selected, can do something; 
the utilization of history lessons, literature lessons, 
Latin, Greek, and French lessons for skilful comment 
(not preaching comment, but healthy, manly talk) 
can do very much; and, especially in the later years 
of the secondary school, the master can find many 
occasions for a serious word on questions of morals 
with this boy alone, with that group of three or four, 



THE DONNING OF LONG TROUSERS 235 

or with a whole class which has been put into solemn 
mood by some local or national calamity. 

But how can teachers, with their thousand other 
duties, get at boys so as to have any such influence 
upon them as has been suggested ? With schools of 
such size and with classes of such numbers as the 
modern school presents, how can a teacher exert a 
personal influence upon every pupil? Fortunately 
that is just what he has no need to do. The ''gang'* 
spirit, the tendency of boys of that age to set up a 
moral code of their own which they will obey almost 
to the very death, gives to the teacher a means of 
dealing with youth which manifolds his resources. 
The only essentials are that a master should have 
so few boys as to be able to know them all, and that 
he should know how to fathom^, as far as possible, 
each boy's character. That knowledge gained, he 
can then devote himself mainly to influencing the 
"gang" leaders. These may be a dozen; they are 
more likely to be only four or five; often there will 
be but one. Whether one or ten, let the teacher get 
those leaders attached to him with hooks of steel, let 
him fill them with the spirit that he wants the school 
to have, let him lay out for them, without their per- 
ceiving it, the code of morals which he wants the 
school to obey, and the gang leaders are almost 
certain to do the rest. They have a power over the 



236 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

other boys that no teacher can ever hope to gain, 
they have a sway which makes the Czar of Russia 
but a feeble potentate, they will and can lead their 
minions to the jaws of death. Having such power, 
these gang leaders are bound to lead, the rest of the 
boys are certain to be led. It is for the teacher to 
determine whether they shall be led up or down. 
Atmosphere counts for almost everything in a school, 
and it is these leaders who create that atmosphere; 
but the good teacher, by a little finesse^ a great deal 
of human charity, and a genuine love and under- 
standing of boys, can make himself the Richelieu 
behind these puppet kings. 



T 



CHAPTER XV 

THE MECHANIC ARTS 

HE radical, John Ball, back in the fourteenth 
centuiy, used to stir the people with a 
rhyme that was older still: 

" When Adam dolve and Eve span 
Who was then the gentleman?" 



And to this very hour every one of us lives or makes 
his living by digging or by spinning — that is, by 
agriculture or the mechanic arts. We are accus- 
tomed, it is true, to divide the occupations of men, 
roughly, into agriculture, the mechanic arts, busi- 
ness, commerce, and the professions; but to-day 
agriculture is substantially dependent upon the 
mechanic arts, business and commerce are merely 
the processes of moving and exchanging the products 
of those fundamental divisions of industry, and, with 
insignificant exceptions, the professions rest upon 
agriculture or upon manufacturing. Without ag- 
riculture, the billions of the world would starve with- 
in a week; were there no mechanic arts, mankind 

237 



238 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

would still be dwelling in caves and subsisting upon 
roots and the flesh of such creatures as, with sticks 
and stones, he might manage to destroy. What 
man is to-day, physically, is due to the fact that 
primeval man (personified as Adam) built up the 
science and art of agriculture; what he is to-day, 
mentally, morally, and aesthetically, is due to the 
fact that Eve and her descendants (for in primitive 
times the mechanic arts were wholly in the hands 
of women) have supplemented the bounty of nature 
and the strength of the human hand by the cunning 
of tools and the tireless energy of machinery. 

The mechanic arts divide themselves, fundamen- 
tally, into two great classes: craftsmanship and man- 
ufacturing. In the former a man fashions things 
primarily with his hands; in the second he is but a 
link in a great chain of persons and machines needed 
to convert raw material into finished goods. In the 
first class the product is counted by dozens; in the 
other by hundreds of thousands of dozens. Crafts- 
manship, of course, dates from the very beginning 
of mankind and was the main thing differentiating 
men from animals. A spider can fashion a wonder- 
ful web and a bird can build a perfect nest, but In 
all the centuries they have not learned to do any- 
thing else or in any new way. Man, beginning with 
a forked stick to scratch the ground and a stone to 



THE MECHANIC ARTS 239 

pound grain, went on until he produced all the com- 
forts and luxuries of modern civilization. 

As already said, in primitive days the women were 
the craftsmen, and the females of the household 
made with their hands or with rude implements all 
that was needed by the entire family. As intelli- 
gence progressed, however, labor became diver- 
sified, for a woman who devoted herself to one form 
of handicraft could become, of course, more expert, 
turning out better things and more of them in a 
given time. Gradually, as life grew to be more 
settled, craftsmanship became no longer a family 
affair, but a matter of the community, men as well 
as v/omen took a share in it, and there arose distinct 
trades and occupations. Thence followed the idea 
of teaching a trade; and at last rose trade monopoly, 
only those who had been adopted and taught by a 
group of craftsmen being allowed to ply that par- 
ticular craft. Out of this came the great trade 
guilds of the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, 
when the mechanic arts were in the hands of power- 
ful, organized societies which limited their members, 
educated only a picked number of youth, and finally 
monopolized practically all the manufacturing and 
commerce of the then civilized world. These, like 
other monopolies, finally broke down by their ov/n 
weight; but, bad as many of their features were, they 



240 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

did at least four things: they began free government; 
they proved that any art, however humble, may be 
made a great art; they founded schools for the 
education of their apprentices, out of which modern 
education has very largely come; and they estab- 
lished a system of apprenticeship which endured 
until far into the eighteenth century and for which all 
educators are eagerly seeking a modern substitute. 
Late in that eighteenth century, however, it was 
discovered that steam could take the place of human 
strength, and out of that simple discovery developed 
modern machinery with its revolutionary influence 
upon all modern history. The huge mill is not a 
place where things can be done in the same way as 
in the shop of the old craftsman; the problems of a 
factory are not those of a one-room shop; and be- 
cause we are still trying to fit old ways to new con- 
ditions do we find ourselves in what is called 
industrial warfare, but which would better be 
named industrial adjustment. 

We are prone to talk, moreover, as though handi- 
crafts had wholly disappeared and as if machinery 
had turned the men and women who manipulate 
it into soulless machines themselves. We forget, 
however, that no machinery can take the place of 
the vast body of house-craftsmen or of artist-crafts- 
men — of carpenters, masons, plumbers, stone- 



THE MECHANIC ARTS 241 

cutters, wood-carvers, etc. — and we forget, too, that 
almost any machine calls for more skill and brains, 
though at the same time for less artistic power, in 
its handling than did many of the outworn crafts. 
The blessing of machinery is, of course, that by turn- 
ing out many more things at a much less price it is 
enabling a continually increasing proportion of man- 
kind to have more comfort and more happiness and 
to be of more use in the world. What remains to 
be done with machinery is, firsts to adjust it more 
perfectly to the social welfare, and then to make it 
produce more beautiful and more solid results. 

Beauty, however, was not all that disappeared, 
temporarily, with the overthrow of the old handi- 
crafts. The apprentice system went too; and the 
crying question of to-day is how properly to educate 
a boy for the mechanic arts and industries. If he 
is brought up in the country he gets his training for 
agriculture as he goes along; if he seeks a profession 
he finds the colleges and schools of technology all 
ready to prepare him; if he thinks of going into 
business he will discover that his public school has 
given him a fairly good training, for most of those 
schools lay out their courses as if every pupil were 
going into either a college or a counting room. If, 
however, a boy wants to follow a trade or to take up 
manufacturing, he will find it difficult, in the first 



242 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

place, to get in at all, and, after he gets In, all the 
education he acquires must be picked up, with rare 
exceptions, haphazard and by observation, a most 
wasteful and discouraging way in which to learn. 
This is doublyunfortunate, for it overloads commerce 
with boys who might do better work in a trade, and 
it deprives the crafts of young men who would 
honor them and of whom those crafts are in direst 
need. 

There is little danger of our going too far. It 
seems to me, in influencing young men to take up 
trades and manufacturing rather than a mercantile 
career. The hard and regular physical work, the 
opportunity for using all his powers, the chances for 
bettering himself, the consciousness that he is 
creating a good and useful thing: these are ten times 
better for a youth than anything which he can gen- 
erally get in an average counting room or shop. 
Whatever the life-work, the main qualities which 
make for success are honesty, moral courage, re-« 
sourcefulness, faithfulness, ambition. As a rule, 
there is much more to encourage those virtues and 
there is much more opportunity to exhibit them in 
a trade or in manufacturing than is usually afforded 
by any species of mercantile life. 

As has been pointed out, the first difficulty which 
meets a boy in trying to take up any of the mechanic 



THE MECHANIC ARTS 243 

arts as a profession is that of getting a proper edu- 
cation. A second problem will confront him not 
only when he tries to enter a trade but also after he 
gets in: the problem of the trade union. And if 
a young man joins a trade union let him take an ac- 
tive part in what it does. The unions have done 
many foolish and wrong things; but the principle of 
trade unionism is sound, and what is right in prin- 
ciple is bound eventually to come out right in 
practice. It is right that men in a craft should com- 
bine to secure decent and equitable conditions, 
proper homes, fair wages, that esprit de corps which is 
the soul and strength of every profession and every 
craft as well. It is wrong for the unions — as many 
of them do — to oppose trade schools; it is wrong 
for them to limit the number of apprentices, except- 
ing as a profession limits its membership by keeping 
out the dishonest and the ignorant; from every point 
of view it is wrong for them to discourage any 
member from doing just as much and just as good 
work as he possibly can. But these are the mistakes 
of social adjustment and of inexperience; they arise 
largely from the fact that the strongest craftsmen 
have held aloof and have let the weaker and more 
radical rule. But under strong, wise management 
the unions have it in their power not only to solve 
the difficult problems of modern industry, but 



244 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

also to be, just as were the guilds of four centu- 
ries ago, the best schools and training-grounds for 
a sane and enduring democracy, the best bulwarks, 
therefore, of a free and enlightened popular govern- 
ment. 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE EDUCATIONAL BEARINGS OF MANUAL 
TRAINING 

MANUAL training, when properly understood 
and rightly carried on, bears directly and 
deeply upon coordination, creativeness, 
culture, and character. Upon these educational 
foundations, manual training can stand "four- 
square to all the winds of heaven," maintaining 
itself triumphantly against the cold north wind 
of blind opposition, the chilling east wind of snob- 
bish "culture," the soft south wind of educational 
sentimentality, and the healthful west wind of 
intelligent conservatism. 

Even the conservatives in matters of schooling 
are now agreed that coordination of the physical, 
mental, and spiritual powers is at the basis of all 
real education. From the wild waving of the 
infant's arms and the ghastly rolling of his un- 
tutored eyeballs up to the skill and self-poise of a 
greatest leader of mankind the educational process 
is mainly one of coordination, of adjusting this 

245 



I 



246 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

marvellous human mechanism, of training the will 
to take intelligent command of the ph3^sical, mental, 
and moral powers. But complete coordination can- 
not be brought about so long as that side of the 
physical, of the mental, and — let us not hesitate 
to say — of the spiritual nature reached, and reached 
only, by manual labor is left out of account. It is 
self-evident that there must be lines and areas of 
coordination which can be completed in no other 
way. It is of no moment that I cannot make a 
shipshape box or forge a respectable hammer; but it 
is of serious consequence to me that in my education 
the coordinative processes involved in the making 
of the box and hammer were left wholly out of 
account. Hand training would not simply have 
given me manual skill; it would have opened for me 
new channels of intercommunication; it would have 
unsealed for me mental and moral avenues now 
doubtless forever closed; it would have strength- 
ened markedly my poise and power of will. From 
the block-building of the kindergarten to the 
highest development of the fine arts every manual 
process not purely automatic, every manual proc- 
ess which requires cooperation of mind and muscle, 
is an important step forward in that general co- 
ordination which is the main end, and in which lies 
the chief use, of all human education. Therefore, 



MANUAL TRAINING 247 

simply as an aid to coordination, manual training 
would justify itself, were that the sole point of its 
educational bearing. As a matter of fact, however, 
this is its most elementary utility. It serves much 
higher uses in bringing out individuality, in awaken- 
ing desire for learning, in stimulating the will to take 
complete and wise command. 

It is an observation as old as time that to arouse 
interest one must promote activity, that "to do is 
to know." It was not Froebel who discovered, but 
it was he who most clearly insisted, that the way to 
learn is to learn by doing. Out of this doctrine have 
grown those laboratory methods of teaching which, 
starting in the kindergartens and the technological 
schools, have invaded even the most hidebound col- 
leges, and are sweeping up through the elementary 
and down through the secondary into that last 
stronghold of conservatism, the grammar schools. 
If, in teaching a child, one can make him actually 
do something himself, can lead him to create some- 
thing really his ov/n, then one has found a means 
surer than any other for arousing dormant and 
holding vagrant faculties, has opened a clear path 
to whatever capabilities the child may have, has 
established at least one point of contact between the 
trained individuality of the teacher and the, as yet, 
nebulous individuality of the growing child. But 



248 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

what opportunity did the old-fashioned curricula 
offer for this important business of creativeness? 
They presented, as a rule, but one avenue — and that 
the least likely for the child to follow — the avenue 
of literary creation. Literary creation, however, is the 
most difficult of all arts, it presupposes the widest ac- 
quaintance with civilization and with life, it is one in 
which the child soonest meets insurmountable obsta- 
cles. Nevertheless, the old courses of study, feeling 
dimly the necessity for creativeness in education, 
set pupils at the work of creating, and, as a result, we 
had in schools those worse than futile "composi- 
tions" on Faith, Hope, or Charity; we had in col- 
leges that abomination of educational desolation, 
the writing of Latin verse. In both exercises the 
creative element was about as genuine as in the con- 
versation of a garrulous parrot. If teased by fond 
parents to admire those compositions or those verses, 
because of their inherent difficulty, one felt like 
making rude Sam Johnson's reply to the mother who 
asked him to admire her daughter's harpsichord 
playing because of the difficulty of the performance: 
"Difficult, madam? Would God it were impos- 
sible!" 

With manual training, however — using the 
phrase so broadly as to include the feeblest "oc- 
cupation" of the youngest flower in the kinder- 



MANUAL TRAINING 249 

garten — the immature faculties are not forced out 
of their normal path, the child is not compelled to 
lie to you and to himself by pretending to a literary 
power which he cannot have. One simply employs 
the natural instinct of the child to use its hands, 
one merely seizes upon that passion of most 
children to make something, one but leads into 
regulated channels the brimming enthusiasm of 
healthy youth for the bending and shaping of inan- 
imate things. 

One might show, of course, many directions in 
which the creative instinct stimulated by manual 
training serves, as no other educational process can, 
in the development of many a boy and girl; but 
perhaps the most far-reaching use is in unlocking 
and then in forming and strengthening individuality. 
The most pressing educational question is how to 
save the child's individuality, how to keep him from 
becoming a mere cog in the colossal social ma- 
chine. In our pride at giving free education to 
millions of children, in our delight at the smoothness 
with which the day's program glides by, at the 
precision with which, so to speak, the pupils present 
arms to us, their officers, we are falling into an easy 
but most dangerous uniformity, we are securing a 
quiet in our schoolrooms that is too often the death- 
quiet of spiritual collapse. Such phalanx-teaching 



250 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

IS not education: It is pedagogical militarism. 
Real education forbids such uniformity, and de- 
mands instead that every boy and girl during every 
school-day be brought within the personal view and 
understanding, within the sphere of direct, humaniz- 
ing influence of the human man or woman who is, 
or ought to be, the child's teacher. The first step 
toward this real education is, of course, to secure 
smaller classes in the schools, and over those smaller 
classes to place, in every instance, teachers who know 
how to teach. But a second step (and it will go far) 
is to infuse into our school programs, from the 
very first to the very last year of school, much manual 
training of many kinds. For manual training, of 
whatever type, cannot be done by battalions: it 
must be performed by individuals. Handwork 
cannot be slurred over in chorus: it must really be 
done, each piece and process, under the teacher's eye. 
A class in handicraft cannot be kept by any person 
with a voice harsh enough and an eye piercing 
enough to maintain cowed silence among seventy 
children: it must be supervised by some one who 
knows how, who can stand the tangible test of his 
pupils' handiwork, and who, since he must per- 
sonally watch every child's task, cannot in the very 
nature of things be insulted by being told to educate 
— save the mark ! — a crreater number of human 



MANUAL TRAINING 251 

beings than is usually given of young pigs to a 

swineherd's custody. 

Manual training, then, makes for the intensive 
development of the individual under the vigilant 
eye and the really educating mind of the individual 
teacher. But education should be extensive as well 
as intensive. It should first, of course, develop 
the individual along the H'^s^ of his individuality; 
but, having done that, it ought next to broaden 
that individual along the lines of human civilization. 
In other words, having brought the child to a knowl- 
edge of himself, it should lead him next to know the 
human race. From the cultivation of the single 
boy or girl, it should widen out to the culture of 
humanity. Therefore, the third educational bearing 
of manual training is upon the culture side. 

To join culture — a fetish word as blessed to the 
conservatives as *' Mesopotamia" was to the old 
lady — to manual training is to scandalize the tories 
in education, is to amuse that lessening class of men 
who blandly assert that no useful study can be 
cultural. Nevertheless, to culture in its true mean- 
ing manual training has a most important relation. 
For to have culture is not merely to be learned in the 
classics and in literature: it is to have a mind fur- 
nished with many, and many different, things; it is 
to have breadth of view, knowledge of the world, 



252 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

skill in dealing with men, ability to foresee and intel- 
ligence to grapple with the complex problems which 
meet one every day; it is to possess an agreeable, an 
equable, a tolerant personality; it implies tact; it 
means, above all, power to understand and to deal 
with men. But how is one to be really broad, how 
is one to be able to meet all kinds of men, how is one 
to know life as the really cultured man ought to 
understand it, if that whole side of his experience 
which should look toward industrialism, toward 
that manual labor which lies at the foundation of 
all arts and livelihood and life itself, is little better 
than a blank wall? It is not to be maintained, of 
course, that skill in carpentry will unravel for a man 
the labor question or enable him to deal wisely with 
the problems of the industrial world; but he whose 
hands as well as his memory and judgment have 
been trained, he who has actually labored and has 
had experience, on however small a scale, of what 
the industrial processes involve — he is a far broader 
man, is a far more liberal man, is a far more all- 
round man, than one who has simply been delving, 
no matter how deeply, into literature, philosophy 
and abstract ethics. The former may possess less 
knowledge than the latter of the humanities, but 
he will know more of humanity; and culture, in the 
modern understanding of it, is the science and art 



MANUAL TRAINING 253 

of living wisely and nobly with and for one's fellow- 
men. 

Fourthly, manual training bears strongly and 
with excellent effect upon that goal of all education 
— character. This follows naturally from its lesser 
function as a coordinative force. To educate is to 
coordinate; and to coordinate is to put the powers of 
the body and mind more and more under the com- 
mand of an intelligent, a purposeful, an upward- 
striving will. What, indeed, is a formed character 
but one in which all the functions, all the thoughts, 
all the motives, all the desires, are marshalled, ruled 
and inspired by a strong and well-balanced will ? To 
have taken a piece of wood and compelled it to the 
shape that lay in one's mind or upon one's paper — 
is not that an exercise in will-strengthening of the 
highest educative value ? To forge the iron, to carve 
the wood, to mold the clay, to draw the design, to 
conceive and to impress the pattern — is not each one 
of these a healthful, really educational development 
of will-power, accompanied by that sense of pleasure 
which comes from the act of construction, by that 
still higher delight arising from the contemplation of 
one's own finished work? And let us note, in pass- 
ing, the tremendous advantage of manual training 
as an educator of the will, in that its results do not 
have to be explained or accepted upon faith or 



2S4 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

looked forward to in some far future of postponed 
rewards. With the work of one's hands the effort, 
often hard and disagreeable, is followed immediately 
by its result, good if that effort has been earnest and 
genuine, bad if that effort has not been sustained 
and real. Every piece of handwork preaches to the 
child, in tones which he cannot fail to understand, 
the awful law of cause and effect, the immutable 
law that "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he 
also reap." 

These, I maintain then, are the four chief bear- 
ings of manual training upon education. Rightly 
conceived and carried on, it promotes coordination, 
it develops creativeness, it broadens culture, it 
strengthens character. What are some things es- 
sential, however, in order that it may do its perfect 
educational work in these four directions? In 
order to further coordination, manual training in 
some form (and its forms are protean) must have an 
integral place and an uninterrupted sequence in 
the curriculum from the earliest kindergarten to 
and through the university. Coordination is not 
a process to be taken up to-day and dropped to- 
morrow; and, if manual training is to play a vital 
part in coordination, it must not be chopped up 
and scattered about to suit fanciful program- 
mongers. It must be built up logically and de- 



MANUAL TRAINING 255 



veloped wisely, to serve the needs of a real, organic 
education. 

Next, to fulfil its function as a stimulus to crea- 
tiveness, manual training must really create some- 
thing: it must produce things of use, things of 
beauty. The child or the youth, when set to work 
with tools, is not satisfied merely to learn an abstract 
principle: he seeks to do something tangible; and it 
is educationally right that this craving should be 
gratified. His teachers must make certain only 
that this tangible creation of his is really useful and 
is truly beautiful with that genuine beauty which 
grows out of the fitness of an object to Its purposes. 

Thirdly, to fulfil its culture function, manual 
training must be representative of the life of the 
child's house and of Its neighborhood, of the atmos- 
phere of his town or city, of the larger genius of his 
nation and his race. It must identify the child 
closely with the general industries of his people, with 
the special industries of his community. It must 
connect him, hardly less closely, with the industrial 
and social history of mankind, with that age-long 
history of which his own developing life is the incon- 
ceivably rapid epitome. Above all, his training on 
this side must be toward genuine craftsmanship, 
toward the making of true things solidly, of solid 
things beautifully. The use of what he makes, the 



256 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

beauty of what he makes, must ever be clearly before 
him; and use and beauty must be made to dwell, 
inseparable, in his thoughts and his ideals. In 
this way will he come, better than in any other, to 
a real conception, to a genuine appreciation, to a true 
understanding of aesthetics, and of the close inter- 
dependence of the aesthetic and the ethical. 

As to the fourth bearing of manual training, its 
bearing upon character, I have already dwelt upon 
it. We cannot do good handwork without sticking 
to honesty and truth; we cannot, in manual training, 
hide or equivocate or slide over. The good work we 
do is there, the bad work we do is there, plain for all 
the world to see. And every eifort made in such train- 
ing is a discipline of the will, every success is a strength- 
ening and stimulus of that will, every failure, if the 
child be good for anything, is a trumpet-call to the re- 
newal of that light in which, if good character is to re- 
sult, the will must gain the mastery. The splendid 
opportunity of the manual trainer is that he may by 
his teaching prove what Browning said, that 

" It is the glory and the good of art 
That Art remains the one way possible 
Of speaking truth." 

What, then, are some of the things which manual 
training must work for and must secure if it would 



MANUAL TRAINING 257 

take Its rightful place among the great educational 
agencies of modern civilization? As was said In the 
beginning, even the conservatives acknowledge co- 
ordination to be at the foundation of all education; 
and a very little effort ought to persuade them of the 
value of manual training as a coordlnatlve force. 
Therefore, the first thing to demand would seem to 
be continuity in manual training throughout the 
whole school life. What have we now? Excellent 
manual training In the kindergarten (provided 
It be carried on for the reason that It Is good for 
the child to create, and not In deference to some far- 
fetched symbolism). We have excellent manual 
training in some secondary schools. In the years 
between we find some coherent, much Incoherent, 
drawing; we find here some sloyd, there some cook- 
ing, elsewhere some sewing, and, scattered hither 
and yon, various more or less mad experimentations 
of sundry cranks and school committees. Most of 
these experiments are tried one year and are aban- 
doned the next, are hotly pursued by one committee 
and are roundly denounced by its successor. But 
in this Is neither cohesion of plan nor coordination 
of results. Secondary-school men may lay out good 
courses; but, as a rule, they are superstructures 
without foundations, hanging In educational air. 
Those courses ought, however, to be the culmination 



2S8 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

of eight years of wisely planned, steadily pursued, 
widely varied manual training exercises. The 
pupils coming to a high school should not there first 
meet with tools; these children should have been 
uninterruptedly using their hands to create, just as 
they have been using their tongues to speak, from 
their earliest day at school. Manual training can- 
not promote coordination until that training itself 
is made coordinate. 

Furthermore, it seems to me, manual training 
ought to stop apologizing and ought, if it must, to 
come out and fight. It was perhaps necessary, 
away back in the seventies, for this new kind of 
study, like the genius imprisoned in Sindbad's bottle, 
to speak low and make fair promises; for it was 
indeed corked up tight by that then master of the 
educational situation, the nine-centuries-old monastic 
curriculum. It was probably the part of wisdom 
for manual training at that time to swear that it had 
no thought of being useful, that it did not dream of 
connecting itself with vulgar trades, that it would 
deal with principles, not with practices, that it would 
teach the driving of nails, but not the making of a 
living. That probation period, however, has gone 
by. The bottle has been uncorked, the genius of 
manual training, or, rather, of laboratory methods, 
has come out, and has expanded to enormous pro- 



MANUAL TRAINING 259 

portions; while before It kneels the old curriculum, 
in its turn apologizing for existence, in its turn beg- 
ging for the right to live. The *^humanties" may 
not like manual training any better than they did 
thirty years ago; but their dislike now is the hate of 
fear, not of supercilious arrogance. 

Being, then, practically masters of the educational 
field, why longer maintain the fiction of academic 
uselessness, why longer declare that manual train- 
ing intends to be only disciplinary, not economically 
serviceable? Its use, as I have tried to show, is 
superlatively in the direction of physical, mental, and 
moral discipline; but its power In those directions 
will be infinitely greater if it allies itself with life, 
with industry, with bread-and-butter getting. For, 
after all, every one of us must get his bread and 
butter, the great majority must earn it by their 
own two hands. No school education, praise Heaven, 
can be so bad as to defraud us of the lifelong school- 
ing of our dally toil. But during all these centuries 
(thanks mainly to its monastic origin) education 
has been acting as though it could stand apart from 
life and livelihood, has been holding itself aloof 
from the boy's and girl's real interests, has been 
covertly sneering at manual labor, has been filling 
thousands and tens of thousands of honest youth 
with a vague notion that the educated man can be a 



26o NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

sort of lily of the field which, having arrayed itself 
in Greek and Latin, need neither toil nor spin. 
Therefore, we see such a host of starveling clerks, 
pettifogging lawyers, and political hangers-on; 
therefore we find it well-nigh impossible to get a 
good mechanic; therefore we observe the tendency 
of craftsmanship — once jealous of its skill and rep- 
utation — to seek short hours and shoddy ways of 
work. The present curse of this country is glue. 
With it we stick senseless jig-saw work upon our 
furniture, foolish gewgaws on our "Crazy-Jane" 
houses, hideous passementerie on our slop-shop 
gowns, demoralizing smatterings of false culture 
upon our boys and girls. Manual training, if it 
will, can carry on a crusade of the noblest kind, a 
crusade against this spirit of veneer, sham, hypocrisy; 
a crusade against any ornamentation, culture, or 
virtue that is only stuck on; a crusade for that real 
beauty, whether in craftsmanship, in art, in archi- 
tecture,, in literature, in social and political life, 
which grows out of the honest dedication of any- 
thing, no matter how homely or common, to a 
noble use; a crusade against false, monastic, anti- 
social, self-centred culture; a crusade for real cul- 
ture, which, as I have already said, is the science 
and art of living wisely and nobly with and for one's 
fellowmen. 



MANUAL TRAINING 261 

To these ends, it seems to me, manual training 
must go into every school; and it must go, not as a 
fixed plan of study, but as a special means of meet- 
ing the particular needs of that school's children. 
What, it should ask, is the prevailing industry of this 
city, what the peculiar craft of this neighbourhood, 
what are these particular boys and girls almost 
certain to be and do? Having ascertained these 
facts, manual training can then perform an educa- 
tional work such as has scarcely yet been dreamed 
of in ennobling those industries, in uplifting those 
children's ideals, in marrying education to life, in 
wedding true culture to genuine industry. 

To perform this great work, however, manual 
training has still another fight to wage, a fight against 
the absurd distinction between the arts called use- 
ful and the arts called fine. There is' and should be 
no such discrimination. No art is fine which does 
not, through its beauty as through an enhancing 
veil, exhibit its fundamental use. No art is useful 
which does not, even in its simplest forms, mount 
into the empyrean of the fine. Beauty and truth 
are one and the same, and every exercise in manual 
training should emphasize both. The great fields 
of ethics and aesthetics can be reached through other 
avenues than Greek and Latin; but we have scarcely 
yet surveyed these avenues, while we have allowed 



262 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

the old classical paths to be overgrown with gram- 
matical and philological weeds. One of the broadest 
of the modern avenues to ethics and aesthetics is 
through manual training, whose possibilities as a 
true culture study are, in my opinion, almost wholly 
undeveloped. For in most instances the manual 
trainers have avoided use lest they offend the edu- 
cational tories, have failed of beauty because, first, 
there cannot be beauty without use, and, secondly, 
because aesthetics has been terra incognita to the 
well-meaning mechanic-teacher, who, given a task 
to which he was unequal, has been as ignorant of 
child training as of true manual art. 

This brings us to the final, and what all educators 
know to be the crucial, problem of the manual 
training question: how to get teachers fit for the 
splendid work that they might do. In the beginning 
resort had to be, of course, to the ranks of the skilled 
mechanics: sincere men, well-intentioned men, men 
seeking to do the best they could. But they were 
not trained teachers; they were hampered by the 
absurd restrictions against usefulness in manual 
training; they were obliged to build for the high- 
school pupils whom they taught a superstructure 
without educational foundations. So there resulted 
something which was w^ell called shop-work; for it 
was little other than the 'prentice work of any shop, 



: MANUAL TRAINING 263 

interesting, somewhat stimulating, better than noth- 
ing. But it was not and is not manual training in 
the sense in which we see its higher possibilities; 
it could not, in very great measure, aid in co- 
ordination, stimulate creativeness, promote culture, 
or build up character. For that true work of 
manual training the schools must have broadly 
educated, completely trained, highly inspired men 
and women, who see the many bearings of manual 
training upon life and character, who are wise in art, 
in ethics, and in that offspring of art and ethics which 
men call aesthetics. There are many such teachers 
now. When such are in the majority, manual 
training will surely be extended into all its many 
educative forms, will be then made continuous 
throughout the whole school life, will be then up- 
lifted to its rightful place as one of the strong 
teaching forces of modern times. 



CHAPTER XVII 

THE RUSSIAN SYSTEM OF MANUAL TRAINING 

THE Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia, 
in 1876, was an epoch In the history of the 
United States, for the exhibits there shown 
made us realize, as we had not before, our weak 
as well as our strong points as a nascent indus- 
trial nation. Though far smaller than subsequent 
"World's Fairs," such as that at Chicago, the 
Philadelphia Exposition was much more efficient 
as a means of education; and the people who came 
to it really regarded it seriously as such. This, 
together with the fact that it was held just at the 
beginning of an extraordinary era of national ex- 
pansion, gives It for all time a high place among the 
agencies which have carried this country to the 
front among the powers of the world. 

Especially did the exhibits of such countries as 
France, Japan, Russia, Sweden, and Norway make 
us realize how deficient we were in the applied arts 
and how much we had to learn in the direction of 
uniting beauty with use in the industrial processes. 

264 



THE RUSSIAN SYSTEM 265 

Those having to do with teaching, especially in the 
field of science and the arts, were above all aroused 
to the necessity of training the manual powers (with 
all which that involves) if we were to give an educa- 
tion suited to the increasingly urgent demands of 
the industrial world. This being the case, such 
men studied most eagerly the exhibit of the Im- 
perial Technical School at Moscow and believed 
they had found in the system which that exem- 
plified the surest means of training young Americans 
to understanding and power in the direction of 
manual training and industrial art. 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology main- 
tained at Philadelphia, for several weeks during 
that summer, a student camp which gave its under- 
graduates the double benefit of military discipline 
and of seeing the "Centennial" thoroughly and 
cheaply. Dr. John D. Runkle, then president of 
the Institute, had, of course, general oversight of 
this educational excursion; and he was so struck with 
the Russian manual training exhibit that almost 
immediately upon his return from Philadelphia 
he called the attention of the Corporation of the 
Institute formally to this system of education and 
urged the establishment at the Boston school of 
shops modeled upon those of Moscow. Such shops 
were built in 1876, were opened to secondary- school 



266 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

pupils under the name of a " School of Mechanic 
Arts" in 1877, and since the taking over of that 
form of training by the city of Boston, about 1884, 
have been maintained and greatly developed as the 
"Mechanical Laboratories" of the Institute. Mean- 
while Prof. C. M. Woodward had established (in 
1877) similar opportunities for training in St. Louis; 
and from those two enterprises have grown all the 
manual-training high schools and like institutions 
in the United States. 

As mechanical laboratories in connection with 
technological education, shops conducted upon the 
so-called Russian system are admirable educational 
agencies, for they give young men who are to be 
leaders in the great industrial enterprises that 
general knowledge of the fundamentals of manual 
and shop processes which it is essential for them to 
have; but as a means for the education of youth of 
secondary-school age the system has grave defects 
which are daily becoming, I think, more evident. 
In justice to the Russian originators, it should be 
said that these deficiencies are due mainly to the 
fact that we adopted but half their method; for 
their instniction shops, in which young men were to 
learn the principles of wood-working, forging, metal- 
turning, etc., are followed by construction shops in 
which those same youth apply their more general 



THE RUSSIAN SYSTEM 267 

knowledge and skill in the actual building of struc- 
tures and machines. We took over the first type 
without also establishing, as the Russians do, a 
complementary type of shop without which the first 
has, so to speak, no educational outlet. 

Some of the defects of the system of manual 
training based, in a general way, upon the trun- 
cated Russian system which we adopted appear 
to be : 

(i) The fact that the exercises are such as to be 
beyond the powers of boys below the secondary- 
school age. This confines the work of the manual 
training school substantially to the years between 
fourteen and eighteen, putting it beyond the reach 
of a vast majority of the youth who most need it, 
and hanging it, moreover, in pedagogical air, be- 
tween those unrelated, purely mental exercises that 
have preceded it and those unrelated subsequent 
vocations into which, as a rule, its pupils go. Man- 
ual training should not be a course thrust into the 
school; it should be a steady process of develop- 
ment from the time the child enters school, and 
should be gradually differentiated to meet, on the 
one hand, the individual powers of the pupil, and 
to prepare him in some degree, on the other hand, 
for the vocation which it is most probable that he 
can successfully pursue. 



268 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

(2) The fact — upon which much emphasis was 
laid in the beginning — that the same exercise can 
be given to thirty or forty pupils at one time. 
While this lessens the expense of teaching, it de- 
feats what should be the main purpose of manual 
training — the discovery and development , of each 
child's individuality. 

(3) The fact that, because each pupil has his own 
set of tools and follows a prescribed course, the work 
in manual training is a solitary, instead of being a 
gregarious exercise. Next to determining and de- 
veloping individuality, the manual exercises should 
serve their greatest use in developing the spirit of 
"together," of mutual dependence, and of mutual 
helpfulness. Therefore, the exercises should em- 
body, to the highest degree possible, the element of 
building some structure or machine to which every 
pupil contributes his part, the structure being use- 
less without that part, and the part, on the other 
hand, serving no purpose except as an element of the 
whole. No better means than this can be 
devised of imbuing children with the understand- 
ing and spirit of social service and, therefore, of 
genuine democracy. This service the Russian 
system, as we use it, almost wholly fails to render. 

(4) The fact that this type of manual training 
is so purely an exercise rather than an achievement, 



THE RUSSIAN SYSTEM 269 

thus losing a large part of the value that It ought 
to have as a stimulus to useful and effective living. 
In order that hand education might enter into com- 
petition (so to speak) with mind education, it was 
obliged, in the beginning, to lay stress upon its 
educative purpose and to maintain that it had no 
aim other than that of the more orthodox school 
topics. Therefore it held itself aloof from industry, 
and, except in a general way, refused to let its pupils 
see any connection between the manual training 
exercises and those great trades and industries In 
which the majority of public-school children event- 
ually make their living. That time, however, has 
long passed; and a manual training which does not 
identify Itself with Industry in general, and above 
all with the special Industries of the city or neigh- 
borhood in which the training is given. Is an 
educational anachronism and does little more ser- 
vice In developing and strengthening (mentally 
and morally) the child than did the now-discarded 
processes of learning by rote long lists of meaning- 
less words and still longer pages of unintelligible 
rules. To have Its greatest value, the school edu- 
cation must come as close as possible to the child's 
life and must broaden and uplift that life. To 
most public-school pupils life means some form of 
manual or mechanical Industry. Therefore the 



270 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

school exercises which can come closest to the 
pupil and can do most to uplift him are those which 
are put under the head of manual training. To 
do this, however, they must identify themselves 
with that working life by frankly recognizing what 
the boy or girl is likely to be and by helping him 
or her just as much as it can to secure industrial 
efficiency and economic breadth. 



CHAPTER XVIIl 

THE DEMAND FOR BREADTH 

SPECIALISM is the order of the day. From 
the professor of Greek down to the "pro- 
fessor" who shines one's shoes, that man is 
in demand who is disposed to concentrate all his 
energies upon the learning or the doing of one thing. 
Even our households have become infected, for 
therein is now to be found the very apotheosis of 
specialization. Even so late as the beginning of the 
last quarter of the nineteenth century, one maid 
would do substantially all the work of the house; 
whereas, to-day, the lady who condescends to burn 
one's beefsteak and to parboil one's potatoes will 
not enter the laundry or the dining-room, while the 
other maid (or maids) would join the family in gen- 
eral starvation before so far forgetting her "place" 
as to cook a single meal. 

But what can be expected of the rank and file of 
the modern world when the leaders of American life, 
men in the professions and in those higher institu- 
tions which prepare for the professions, have seem- 

271 



272 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

ingly gone mad upon the question of specialization ? 
Like the gypsy-moth, the specialist was imported 
from Europe, either directly or through young men 
who went there for medical, linguistic or other 
higher studies; and many a green tree of scholarship, 
many a fair, broad field of general culture has been 
converted by this importation into a naked waste 
of narrow pedantry. 

Of course, the time has long gone by when any 
man, no matter how brilliant, can, in Bacon's words, 
*'take all learning for his province." But that does 
not justify the running to an opposite extreme, does 
not excuse the digging of a hole in the side of a small 
mound of erudition, getting into the farthest end of 
it, and maintaining that the tiny patch of sky framed 
by the mouth of the hole is all of the universe worth 
while. It is probably necessary that some man 
should spend his whole life grubbing at a certain 
obstinate Greek root; but why call him learned, when 
he is simply industrious.^ Why reward him with 
titles and emoluments, and give no scholastic 
encouragement to the far less erudite man who is 
nevertheless sending intellectual and moral roots 
over a wide area of human thought and life.'* 

The curse of American scholarship and of Ameri- 
can education is the Ph.D. For in exalting this 
decoration of the specialist we are repeating the 



THE DEMAND FOR BREADTH 273 

error of the Schoolmen, who confounded erudition, 
which dries up the soul, with real wisdom, which 
expands man into almost the very image of the All- 
Wise. Yet this hallmark of erudition is to-day 
practically essential as a key to a faculty position; 
and it is so, not because there seems any valid 
educational reason for it, but largely because it is 
required in Germany and looks well in the pros- 
pectus. As a result, hundreds of young fellows are 
starving themselves and impoverishing their parents 
in order to secure this decoration. To get it they are 
pursuing so-called special investigations, by count- 
ing the number of adverbial clauses in Shakespeare, 
or by sending out questionnaires regarding the 
proportion of children who twiddle their thumbs. 
Having scraped together this fatuous information, 
they are spending much time and money in having 
it printed, in order that another doctorial disserta- 
tion may be added to the dustiest shelves of the 
college library. And these most precious years of a 
man's life, these years in which the youth ought to 
be learning how to broaden his mind and capacities, 
how to deal with men, how to handle his faculties, 
his tongue and himself — these the poor fellow is 
selling for this mess of pottage with which to feed 
the trustees of some lesser or greater university. 
Having been admitted to the teaching staff of the 



274 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

university, the fledgling Ph.D., if he is to hold his 
place, must produce something, and that quickly. 
But since his days, as a subordinate teacher, are 
mainly taken up with such intellect-killing work as 
correcting thousands of themes or counting the ap- 
paratus in the laboratory, how is he to get that 
breadth, experience, and wisdom which alone can 
make what he is expected to produce of any value 
to the world? Half-starved physically and wholly 
starved intellectually and socially, his only alter- 
native is to specialize still more, digging, like a wood- 
pecker, into some worm hole of erudition, in the hope 
of extracting from it a maggot large enough to placate 
the learned university public accustomed thus to 
be fed by young doctors of philosophy. This dig- 
ging is politely called research; but it is the sorriest 
counterfeit of the genuine thing, being but perfunc- 
tory and profitless grubbing. True research must 
be founded upon wide scholarship, upon profound 
knowledge of men, and upon extensive acquaintance 
with the world of letters and of things. To compel 
such callow men as these to specialize is to condemn 
them to intellectual suicide and, in so doing, to kill 
true scholarship. 

In this hard-hearted world it would not very much 
matter that these poor aspirants should waste their 
intellectual powers in this way did it affect only them 



THE DEMAND FOR BREADTH 275 

and their long-suffering wives. But it is these men, 
as a rule, who become professors and heads of de- 
partments, it is they who determine the atmosphere 
and the trend of the colleges, it is this type of spe- 
cialist who Is setting the standards of learning and 
of scholarship for America. As a result we have our 
college populations sharply divided into grinds and 
drones; we have our professions filled with men who 
can do much within the little cell of their specialty, 
but who are wholly Ineffectual In the great world 
of human interests; we have a rich and powerful civ- 
ilization that is breeding pitifully few great leaders 
of human thought. 

There are only two kinds of simon-pure specialists 
allowable: the genius who has such a volume of 
treasure to bestow that every minute of his life should 
be devoted to dispensing it, and the man who is 
given the power of concentrated digging and who is 
vouchsafed no other ability. The latter will grub 
out the absolutely essential minutiae without which 
learning cannot advance. The former will call down 
from heaven those divine fires which are to keep 
civilization aflame. The number of these specialists, 
however, is. In comparison with the university pop- 
ulation. Infinitesimal; and the great mass of educated 
men need, not concentration, but expansion, an in- 
tellectual highway, not a groove. Of course, every 



276 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

man who hopes to amount to anything must specialize 
in some degree. He must have a vocation and must 
strive toward the highest achievement in that spe- 
cialty. But he must have, in addition, avocations 
to broaden and harmonize and sweeten him; and 
even his vocation must be founded upon such a 
knowledge of men and of life that, at least before his 
fortieth year, he could take up any other vocation 
and succeed in that. 

We specialize our grammar-school children in 
bank discount and leave them to lifelong ignorance 
of what mathematics really means. We specialize 
our high-school youth in battles and sieges and per- 
mit them to remain ignorant of the great historic 
development, through industry and commerce, of 
mankind. We specialize our college youth in hap- 
hazard electives, each taught by a specialist and most 
of them unrelated to all the others, and turn that 
youth out of college a veritable ignoramus in regard 
to himself and to those other selves with whom his 
whole subsequent life will be concerned. We send 
out from our schools of applied science many a man 
competent to put up a bridge, but not competent 
to put up a good front among his equals, wise in the 
handling of formulae, but ignorant in the handling 
of men, full of little knacks and methods of calcula- 
tion, but empty of that tact and that intellectual 



THE DEMAND FOR BREADTH 277 

skill which are absolutely essential to professional 
success. 

The college teaching of literature, for example, 
is being dried and mummified by specialists until 
the study of human thought has become a sort of 
subterranean, philological treadmill, with never a 
glimpse into the wide, high, lasting things to which 
literature should lead. College philosophy Is, as 
a rule, but a comparative anatomy of dead and gone 
systems, never, as it should be, an inspiration to 
wisdom, leading to the love of and the search for 
truth. And how seldom is the teaching of science a 
real search into fundamental principles and an ex- 
position of all-embracing truths! "Facts," said Mr. 
Thomas Gradgrind, "facts alone are wanted in life"; 
and facts — the more minute the better — are the 
goal and joy of the specialist. But man Is not an 
examinable fact; he Is a veritable kaleidoscope of 
elusive impulses, impressions, ideals, fictions; and 
it is with man that the whole life of the educated 
man is to be lived. 

In our schools and colleges (and especially In our 
professional schools) we need to get back to the 
humanities — not to the humanities of Greece and 
Rome as expounded in Oxford and diluted In America 
— but to the humanities of the twentieth century. For 
the study of the real humanities Implies a working 



278 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

knowledge of humankind, of men. We have been 
so overwhelmed with facts and discoveries and 
theories and inventions and names and classifications 
that we are forgetting that the main fact in life is 
you and I. We have been so busy stuffing our chil- 
dren and our students with these facts and these 
classifications that we are forgetting that the main 
things which they, as men, must know are men. 
Therefore give a boy and give a student all the facts 
and all the practice that he can get in school and 
college, provided you do not fail to give him, at the 
same time, a broad outlook upon history, upon liter- 
ature, upon human experience and human life. 
Whether he is to start in a store, in an office, or as a 
"drummer"; whether he is to be a minister, a lawyer, 
an engineer, or a doctor, his success in life depends 
enormously upon his ability to get on with and to 
handle men. He cannot have that success unless he 
is broad, catholic, tolerant, tactful, and philosoph- 
ical; and he cannot be those things unless he has 
been trained, not as a specialist, but as a man. By 
success is not meant, of course, mere financial and 
professional success — though in nine cases out of 
ten those are most likely to be achieved by the 
broadest man — but that highest success which 
comes through the widest social usefulness and 
through the consciousness that one has got out of 



THE DEMAND FOR BREADTH 279 

life that which has made the pains of living really- 
worth while. 

It may be an exaggeration to say that American 
scholarship is in a deplorable condition; but every 
American must acknowledge that we do not produce 
our due proportion of great men. There are, of 
course, many excuses which may properly be offered; 
but one of the fundamental reasons is that we permit 
our promising youth to specialize too soon. Con- 
sequently their scholarship, to paraphrase Bacon, is 
that of boys, who can talk but who cannot generate. 
To produce men with the intellectual loins from 
which will spring great contributions to human 
thought and action we must gradually make over our 
whole system of elementary education so that a youth, 
instead of being put through vast machines for 
imparting facts, shall be put into small classes under 
intellectually strong women, and especially under 
intellectually and morally strong men, who shall 
really develop that boy's mind and character. We 
must then persuade the college authorities not to 
turn callow undergraduates into a jungle of courses 
taught by specialists, but to lay out for those boys 
really developing and strengthening, coherent work 
which shall make them acquainted, as far as they can 
learn at that time of life, with men, society, philoso- 
phy, and genuine wisdom. As to professional train- 



28o NEW DEJVIANDS IN EDUCATION 

ing, the physicians are getting most nearly at the 
heart of the problem by means of their clinics, their 
hospital and "externe" training, through which the 
embryo physician studies not simply medicine, but 
human nature and human life. 

Supposing a youth to be really educated in school 
and college and to be genuinely trained in his pro- 
fessional school, he ought not to specialize until he 
shall have had a number of years of wide experience 
in his work, until, if possible, he shall have traveled, 
until he shall have taken a thorough graduate 
course in the university of the world. Then he will 
have breadth and wisdom and true learning; then 
he will know real scholarship from false; then he will 
be humble, reverent, and eager to know the truth; 
and only when a man arrives at this mental and 
spiritual condition is he fit to be a specialist. Even 
then, as has already been said, no man except a 
genius or a "grubber" is justified in being an out- 
and-out specialist. All others must have at least 
one avocation with which to temper and to put in 
proper perspective their chosen specialties. 



CHAPTER XIX 

WHAT IS DEMANDED OF THE YOUNG ENGINEER 

A MAJOR reason for the ineffectiveness of 
much of our public schooling is that teachers 
and pupils have their eyes and thoughts 
fixed, not upon the real purpose of education, but 
upon the examination of next week or the promotion 
of next June. The school and its processes become 
to them, therefore, ends in themselves. The petty- 
lessons which they teach and learn obscure the broad 
objects of teaching and of learning, and the walls of 
the schoolroom limit their educational horizon. To 
neither such teachers nor such pupils is it ever re- 
vealed that schooling is but a minor means to the 
true end of education, which is, of course, physical, 
mental, moral, and therefore social, efficiency. 

The students in a school of applied science have a 
wider view than this; but in most cases it is an out- 
look far too narrow. They are aiming, it is true, 
toward the goal of a professional career; but they 
usually see in that future profession, not an oppor- 
tunity for social usefulness, not the happiness which 

281 



282 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

is reached through efficiency, not the unselfish de- 
votion of (for example) the "born" physician: they 
anticipate, on the contrary, merely the power, the 
money, and the ultimate ease which professional suc- 
cess may bring. Therefore, few undergraduates 
study the subjects in the curriculum because they 
care for them or because they grasp the relation 
between those topics and the social organism. They 
pursue them simply because the subjects must be 
overleaped — like obstacles in a hurdle-race — by an 
irksome process called examination, in order to secure 
a degree. The degree itself they look upon as an 
end worth working for, since its possession means, 
usually, a remunerative *'job," which will lead to 
others, bringing in, eventually, an income adequate 
to the multitudinous expenditures of modern life. 

Were this the attitude of mind of technological 
students alone, it might justify — or at least ex- 
plain — the sometimes supercilious attitude of the 
college of "liberal arts," and might support its con- 
tention that its atmosphere is broadly cultural, while 
that of the college of science is narrowly utilitarian. 
Under modern conditions, however, the outlook of 
all collegians is practically the same; for, however 
fondly the older institutions may cling to outworn 
forms and terms, however prominently the "human- 
ities " may stand out in their prospectuses, they also 



THE YOUNG ENGINEER 283 

are, in truth, colleges of modern science and of the 
application of science to commercial and industrial 
life. The cloistered student wrapped in love of 
ancient learning is still to be found; but he is en- 
gulfed in the host of youth who, when they do not go 
to college simply for sociability and prestige, regard 
higher education as a kind of trump card in the 
game of money-making. 

More or less unconsciously, colleges of arts and 
colleges of science alike foster this student attitude 
of mind by devoting an undue share of the academic 
year to examinations, by overloading the curriculum 
with examinable subjects, and by permitting the 
several schools or departments to emphasize the 
utilitarian by specializing and intensifying too much. 
As a result, the secondary purpose of a college — 
that of instilling information — too often bulks 
largest in the eyes of all concerned, and obscures 
or even eclipses the leading aims of all collegiate 
education. 

Those major aims should be, in the order of their 
importance: (i) to develop manhood out of boy- 
hood; (2) to make the men thus developed broad- 
gauged, mentally quick and receptive, intellectually 
catholic, tolerant, and modest; (3) to train good 
citizens, in the fullest meaning of that term; and (4) 
to equip for industrial and professional efficiency. 



284 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

To accomplish the last is what the technological 
school is paid especially to do; but, unless that pro- 
fessional training is given in such a way as to supple- 
ment and strengthen in the highest degree all the 
other social forces which are making for manhood, 
breadth, and citizenship, the school has defrauded 
the undergraduate, has failed of its duty as a social 
agent, and has sealed its own doom. 

Even though they be nineteen or twenty years of 
age, most youth come to a college mere boys in 
their childish attitude of mind, their undeveloped 
sense of personal responsibility, their hazy outlook 
upon life and their distorted perspective of them- 
selves in the community. They ought to be gradu- 
ated, however, with their minds ripened and their 
vision cleared. Indeed, the years of their college 
life will have been largely wasted unless, in those 
years, they have acquired a mental and moral se- 
riousness far greater than that of the less well- 
educated man. 

Limiting ourselves to the school of applied science, 
perhaps its paramount duty and opportunity is to 
impress upon a youth as he enters manhood the fact 
that living, instead of being a game of pleasure or of 
chance, or a haphazard acceptance of what comes 
along, is an actual profession — is, indeed, the lead- 
ing vocation of every man — a profession to be 



THE YOUNG ENGINEER 285 

studied, perfected and strategically planned with 
interested thoroughness and far-seeing care. This 
right view of life can be instilled, not only by giving 
the college youth ever wider choice of work, initia- 
tive in working, and responsibility for the quality of 
his work (while holding him to a rational and ordered 
sequence of development), but also by teaching him 
such things and in such a way as to make him in- 
creasingly aware of a man's power over circum- 
stance, and of the multiform opportunity which 
every individual has to shape his own career. 

Another chief use of the education given in a 
scientific school should be to expand a young man's 
vision, to teach him the difference between the small 
and the great things of life, to train him to see the 
world from a clear mountain peak of intellectual 
tolerance rather than from a foggy valley of personal 
prejudices. This breadth and catholicity can be 
inspired by building all his professional and technical 
training upon basic truths and principles; by fram- 
ing his courses of study upon those fundamental 
historical, philosophical and linguistic subjects which 
(quite too exclusively) made up the college course of 
half a century ago; and, most of all, by seeking every 
opportunity to impress upon each student the fact 
that what makes for leadership and power in pro- 
fessional life is not familiarity with technical details 



286 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

and an extraordinary memory for formulae, but 
ability to view questions in a large way, to deal with 
new problems, to handle subordinates easily and 
justly, to meet equals and superiors tactfully and 
upon the broad platform of many human as well as 
professional interests. 

A student will not have secured seriousness and 
breadth, however, if on graduation he believes that 
his professional training is to be used wholly to 
satisfy his personal — and very proper — ambition 
for power and for wealth. He must also have been 
made to realize that, being an extraordinary debtor 
to society, he owes an immense debt of future service 
to the community. He should also have learned 
that the main business of an educated man is to 
grow into wide usefulness by practising the "gre- 
garious" virtues, by placing his abilities as far as 
possible at the service of his neighborhood and 
state, by increasing the five talents of his collegiate 
training into the many times ten talents of personal 
and social power. To this end his technical and his 
non-technical teaching should have emphasized those 
subtle, unselfish, moral qualities which lie at the 
foundation of professional ethics, engineering honor 
and true devotion to the good of the State. 

Whatever may be the sequence of studies, the 
ramification of ^^electives," or the emphasis upon 



THE YOUNG ENGINEER 287 

this detail or upon that, the student should never be 
allowed to become so confused by these minutiae as 
to lose sight of what he goes to a school of applied 
science for. In the student's own mind he goes 
primarily to obtain certain information, a measure 
of technical skill and a scientific jargon which will 
enable him to secure and to hold some remunerative 
professional position. If this mental attitude is 
not rectified, or is encouraged by the placing of too 
much emphasis upon technical information, 
"knacks," formulae, and phrases, the youth will 
devote himself zealously, even enthusiastically — 
but none the less fatally — to things which, without 
the higher aims, are but the chaff of education. 
The strongest evidence of a freshman's lack of 
education is that he does not know how to appraise 
those tasks which he must or may do, that he does 
not understand what the world is going to demand 
of him as the price of real professional success. 

To educate him, therefore — in the right meaning 
of education — the school of applied science must 
not content itself with giving him that technical 
information which, to his untrained vision, is all 
that he requires; it must hold before him and must 
teach him to understand the value and importance 
of those higher standards by which his work as 
a man and as an engineer will be judged by his 



288 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

future employers, by his associates and by the world 
at large. He cannot foresee, therefore he must 
deliberately be made to appreciate, that behind and 
underneath his technical information and scientific 
skill he should possess at least three other things: 
seriousness of view, breadth of mind and a sense of 
civic responsibility. With the first he will learn 
how to measure and control his own life; with the 
second he will learn how to weigh the lives of others; 
with the third he will learn how to place himself 
and all he does in right perspective with the whole 
order of society; and with all three together he will 
be ready to meet and conquer practically every one 
of those problems, moral, social, or technical, with 
which his life is certain to be filled. 

To keep these large purposes and true aims of 
education before themselves and their students is 
extremely difficult for the teaching staff, engrossed 
as they must necessarily be in the thousand details 
of teaching and discipline, and hounded as they are 
from without and within to equip their students 
(like automobiles) with every latest device for 
technical speed and eflftciency. That the faculties 
of most schools of technology have been able to 
preserve the wider view is cause for wonder and con- 
gratulation. With the greater specialization and 
haste of modern life, however, they will find this to 



THE YOUNG ENGINEER 289 

be increasingly difficult unless they receive organized 
and unflagging help from those who stand far 
enough from the details of instruction to see that 
teaching in proper perspective and to measure its 
real results. The two bodies near enough to the 
school of applied science to understand its internal 
methods and aims, and yet far enough away from it 
to gauge its final influence upon young men and its 
ultimate effect upon the industrial and social struct- 
ure, are, of course, the trustees and the alumni. In 
every way possible they should identify themselves 
with their college and its undergraduates; and, while 
refraining from interference with the details of 
courses or of teaching, should keep clearly before 
the students those real aims and ends of all higher 
education which their experience of life should have 
made them clearly see. Just how they are to do this 
is not within the present scope even to suggest. 
Moreover, no two colleges of science would ap- 
proach the problem in the same way. But that 
these high standards must be held before the under- 
graduates of all such colleges, and that the trustees 
and alumni must give conspicuous help in doing so, 
are, I think, self-evident truths in higher education. 



CHAPTER XX 

THE GENESIS OF THESE NEW DEMANDS 

THE New Englander who can boast seven 
generations of native forebears — and this 
number is a rare possession — is inclined to 
speak with some disdain of "New Americans.'' 
Many immigrants who have arrived more recently 
than he certainly do need much Americanizing; but 
so did the Old Americans from whom he sprang. 
Moreover, that process occupied, in the case of those 
earlier comers, at least one hundred and fifty-five 
years — from 1620 until 1775. 

Things m.ove faster now than then; therefore the 
present New Americans will doubtless learn their 
lesson far more rapidly. Moreover, certain special 
causes modified and to a degree retarded the democ- 
ratization of the first generations of immigrants, 
keeping the New England ancestry, as has been 
aptly said, not merely provincial but painfully 
parochial. Potent among those influences was 
that.satan-inspired invention of some early Puritan 
— New England Pie. 

290 



THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 291 

The thing itself is to-day but a reminiscence. 
Pie still exists, but its estate is fallen. From the 
hands of the housemother it has passed to the 
machines of the syndicated bakery, from the break- 
fast table of Emerson it has descended to the 
quick-lunch counter. No longer may one find three 
kinds of pie served three times a day; no longer may 
one see at Thanksgiving pantry shelves groaning 
with pies in military array: artillery squads of 
brilliant cranberry, cavalry squads of yellow pump- 
kin, and solid infantry of apple and mince. 

For generations, however, pie was the fundamental 
diet of the New Englander, as rice was that of the 
Japanese, and it had a profound physiological and 
moral effect. Deficient in nutriment, it bred a lean 
and hungry race, "cantankerous" and hair-splitting. 
A fertile and progressive source of dyspepsia, it 
established the gloom of Calvinism and fomented 
those schisms with which most New England 
villages have been ceaselessly rent. A difficult dish 
rightly to prepare, it established social cleavage 
between those who could and those who could not 
produce light pie-crust; and it actually made or 
marred the married state. Moreover, it named 
society itself, the term "upper crust" connoting 
surface show and crumbling flakiness as contrasted 
with the soggy dulness of that under crust upon 



292 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

which, however, the whole stability, not only of 
pie, but of society depends. 

Singularly, however, the pie metaphor did not 
extend itself farther. It did not occur to our an- 
cestors to apply the pie form to their daily living. 
Not one of those early New Englanders realized 
that, just as the rich juiciness of the pie gathers 
at the centre, so the houses of those pioneers should 
have all been located in a central village, with farms 
radiating therefrom in pie-shaped wedges. 

It is true that our forebears usually established a 
stockade for physical refuge against the occasional 
Indian and a meeting-house for spiritual refuge 
against omnipresent satan; and it is true, too, that 
around these grew up a few stores, taverns, and 
dwellings. But the great bulk of those early people 
lived on widely scattered farms separated one from 
another by long spaces of wilderness, difficult and 
dangerous to cross. 

And on their scattered farms those Old Ameri- 
cans ate their pie in gloomy and censorious iso- 
lation, ruining their digestions, inflaming their con- 
sciences, and developing the family idiosyncrasies 
until the chronicles of some New England towns 
read like the records of a hospital for the mildly 
insane! 

It is easy to see why the original settlers took 



THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 293 

this step so fatal to themselves and so momentous 
to their descendants. Most of them came from 
England, where the sign of aristocracy and wealth 
was the possession of land. The first idea, therefore, 
of every one of those early immigrants, immediately 
upon landing, was to procure by grant, by alleged 
purchase from the Indians, or by simple squatting, 
as much land as he possibly could seize, and then to 
seat himself in the middle of that vast acreage as far 
away as possible from other squatters themselves 
obsessed by the same foolish idea. 

It is idle to speculate upon what might have been; 
but think what a diiference it would have made in 
all our history had those Old Americans taken to 
heart the simple lesson taught not only by their own 
beloved pie, but even by the barbaric Russian, 
and had gathered themselves into close-built vil- 
lages, with the farms extending out therefrom as 
far as the Indians would let them. Not only would 
most of the dreadful massacres of colonial days have 
been averted, not only would their meeting-houses 
have been more cheerful and their schools far better 
than when worshippers and pupils were compelled 
to come together from long distances through 
dangerous wildernesses; but the daily contact of 
village life would have wonderfully rubbed off 
Puritanical sharp corners, brightened dour Calvin- 



294 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

istic faces, modified the extraordinary idiosyncrasies 
of the Yankees, and made them, perhaps, regard 
more charitably the rest of the human race. 

That there was a period of decline, almost of 
degradation, in the history of American schools, 
we are apt to forget or to conceal. With justifiable 
pride we of Massachusetts point to those great 
educational events of the early Puritan days: (i) 
the opening of the Latin School in 1635; (2) the 
founding of Harvard College in 1638; and (3) the 
enacting of the general school law of 1647; but we fail 
to remark that the development of education in the 
United States has not been a steady growth out of 
those magnificent beginnings. That the American 
school should not have gone through its '^Dark 
Ages" period would have been to ask a miracle. 
A people which had to conquer a wilderness, to wage 
war with savages and beasts, to beat back the French, 
to separate itself politically from the mother coun- 
try, and, finally, to put into shape and into practice 
the political and social ideals evolved from a cen- 
tury and a half of transplanted Puritanism, could 
not keep education, in the narrower sense of school- 
ing, upon a very high plane. Those builders of 
a nation were too busy acquiring the rough, but 
enduring, tuition given by the very forces I have 
named, to spend much thought upon such trifles 



THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 295 

as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Their edu- 
cation into nationality was more vital to them than 
national education, and before the strenuousness 
of the former the latter, perforce, gave way. There- 
fore it is not surprising that, while in 1650 almost 
every leader in New England life was college-bred, 
and many a youth was conversant with Latin and 
with Greek, one hundred and twenty-five years later 
the little learning that survived had shrunk away 
into the studies of ministers, lawyers, and the oc- 
casional physician. Outside those professions, he 
(and especially she) who could read and write was the 
exception rather than the rule. 

This widespread illiteracy was due not wholly 
to the fight against the wilderness, not wholly to 
the fact that the grandsons and great-grandsons 
of the first settlers had, through isolation, lost touch 
with things intellectual. It was due mainly to that 
early spirit of exaggerated local independence. 
Those early Yankee communities were disastrously 
centrifugal. No town was too feeble or too sparsely 
settled in colonial days for its town-meeting to 
pass stringent laws excluding newcomers; and 
the grants and purchases of those first settlers 
were pathetically huge. The tendency of all this, 
of course, was to divide and subdivide townships 
into little hostile groups, and to foment ceaseless 



296 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

war between the centre where the church was and 
the outlying districts where the church was not. 
Very early in the eighteenth century this feeling 
began to color the school laws, and by the be- 
ginning of the nineteenth century the tendency had 
gone so far that in most towns the meagre sum 
raised by taxation for the support of the schools was 
parceled out in pitiful fragments among so-called 
school districts, each fragment to be expended by a 
separate and local prudential committee. Mr. 
Martin, in his "Evolution of the Massachusetts 
Public School System," gives an instance where the 
sum to support a district school for an entire year 
was ^5.60. 

Feeble as such an educational system as this 
must have been, that love of learning which was 
as a beacon light to the early New Englanders 
had been kept burning in the colleges and in a few 
academies like Dummer, and had been fanned by 
those real political leaders of New England, its 
autocratic ministry. As order began to come out 
of the political chaos following the Revolution, those 
ministers, the other college men, and the more 
thoughtful among persons of less education realized 
that something must be done to revive popular 
education, that some bridge must be made between 
the feeble '*deestrict" schools and the only less 



THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 297 

feeble colleges. Academies, founded, as a rule, by 
private beneficence and supported by the fees of 
their pupils, sprang up in many widely separated 
towns and were as oases in the desert to hundreds 
and thousands of ambitious boys and girls. But, 
of course, as private academies flourished the already 
starving public schools languished still more, and in 
many instances practically died. Therefore, while 
ultimately the academy proved to be the leaven 
in the educational lump, its immediate effect, too 
often, was to increase the ignorance of the mass of 
the people and to emphasize class distinctions al- 
ready growing dangerous. Yet the work of the 
academies was not only good, it was indispensable. 
For almost all advance in public education in Amer- 
ica has to be made through three slow processes: 
first, private enterprise must be enlisted to set up 
a model school, or to inaugurate, at private charge, 
some new method of teaching; secondly, the public 
authorities must be coaxed to recognize this in- 
novation as good and to give it countenance; 
thirdly, the great public itself must be stimulated 
to force those authorities to adopt, as a public 
enterprise, what was in the beginning a suspiciously 
regarded educational experiment. Following this 
slow road of development, the better way of edu- 
cation was pointed out by those private enterprises, 



298 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

the old academies; next the state gave them semi- 
sanction by occasional aid and official recognition; 
finally the state adopted them, either by converting 
them directly into public high schools, or by erect- 
ing such high schools alongside them in order to kill 
them by a process of gradual absorption. And it is 
greatly to their credit that those academies, having 
performed their essential part in the educational 
work, knew when they were dead. Of course many 
survived; but they have gone back to what was 
the original function of the academy — that of 
preparing boys for entrance into certain affiliated 
colleges. 

With the passing of the academies, however, was 
severed almost the last link between English and 
American methods of education. Our New Eng- 
land educational glory of the seventeenth century 
was predominantly English. Our colleges of that 
early day were Cambridge University transplanted; 
our Latin schools were the familiar grammar schools 
still flourishing in England to the despair of the 
educational reformer; our general school law of 
1647 was simply the school law that England might 
have had two hundred and fifty years earlier than 
she did secure it, had she remained really Puritan. 
But the glory of that educational Renaissance of 
ours which began in the second quarter of the 



THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 299 

nineteenth century and which is but just ending 
was a glory not of England, but of Germany. Our 
whole free-school system in modern days has been 
created, consciously or unconsciously, upon Conti- 
nental, not upon English, models. To-day, how- 
ever, we are beginning to construct a new and dis- 
tinctively American educational ideal, an ideal 
that has taken, or will take, all that is best from 
Germany, from France, from Scandinavia, from 
the Netherlands, from Great Britain, and, vivifying 
this with our truest American aspirations, will 
evolve a really national education adapted to our 
distinctive political ideas, to our unique moral 
standards, to our virile, cosmopolitan race. 

For the greater part of the nineteenth century, 
there is no question that Massachusetts, Connecti- 
cut and New York were ia the van of educational 
advance, and that among those three Massachusetts 
stood first. And what a difficult advance it was! 
To-day we can hardly realize the long, slow, ex- 
asperating fight required to secure the adoption of 
what seem now fundamental principles of schooling. 
The fight meant legislation, it meant education of 
those who were to educate, it meant — hardest of 
all — the arousing of the people to the need and 
importance of educational reform. Such work as 
this can be done only by tireless, fearless, infinitely 



300 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

patient leaders; and splendid champions of that 
type appeared in James G. Carter and Horace Mann 
of Massachusetts, and in Henry Barnard of Con- 
necticut. The special work of Carter was in per- 
suading the Massachusetts Legislature to create a 
Board of Education and to give sanction to state 
normal schools. The special work of Horace Mann, 
as first secretary of that State Board of Education, 
was in exhibiting by figures and through startling 
illustrations, the educational poverty of his state, 
in making the people appreciate their school short- 
comings, and in issuing reports that were direct 
appeals to those people, reports that are smd always 
will be classics in education. The special work of 
Henry Barnard was in doing for Connecticut and 
Rhode Island what Mann did for Massachusetts, 
and also in bringing before Americans, through his 
monumental "Journal of Education," the best 
pedagogical thought and experience of Europe. 
How those men and others like them labored, it is 
difficult for us to-day to appreciate. The apathy, 
the niggardliness, the conservatism they had to meet 
were appalling. They had, first, to destroy the 
district system which was killing the already feeble 
public schools; and in opposing that they had to 
fight one of the dearest traditions of the American 
people. They had to persuade legislatures, and 



THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 301 

that, many of us know, Is heartbreaking work. 
They had to convince teachers of their ignorance 
of the true science and art of teaching; and that was 
— and Is — no easy task. Most of all, they had to 
educate the people to understand the value of free 
public education conducted by persons who are 
fit to teach. 

Mr. Mann found, when he entered upon his 
duties, that 42,000 children In Massachusetts did not 
attend school at all, and that of those who did, the 
average attendance was only seventeen weeks. He 
found those children housed In school buildings 
scarcely fit for swine. He discovered most school 
committees to be Ignorant and slothful, most teach- 
ers to be Ill-trained and worse paid. There was little 
but chaos in the curricula and more than chaos in 
the methods and means of teaching. He found the 
schools rent by sectarian jealousies, and, most 
serious of all, he found the towns divided Into hos- 
tile camps, each district spending its pittance as it 
pleased, choosing its teachers by methods worse 
than haphazard, and opposing all change and im- 
provement with the fanatic fierceness of a puffed-up 
ignorance. To all these evils and to many more he 
devoted his annual reports as secretary, supple- 
menting them by lectures, by teachers' gatherings, 
by appeals of every kind which his zeal and knowl- 



302 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

edge could devise. The good work thus started 
was carried on by equally active successors in the 
Board of Education, and by others Interested In the 
schools, until, little by little, the State of Massa- 
chusetts had established compulsory education 
and child labor laws; had secured truancy laws 
and parental schools to make compulsion effective; 
had founded normal schools to educate the teachers; 
had achieved free high schools and manual training 
schools; had compelled expert supervision; and — 
greatest achievement of all — had aroused public 
opinion in the towns and cities to the point where 
the people house their schools well, pay their teach- 
ers better than they used, demand educated super- 
vision and modern methods of teaching, and, for all 
these things, pay ten times as much, fifty times as 
much, In some cases more than a hundred times as 
much, as they did half a century ago. Although 
there are, of course, great differences among the 
many towns of the Commonwealth, it Is now at 
least nominally required that every child in Massa- 
chusetts shall attend school until his fourteenth 
year; shall be schooled In a building having a pre- 
scribed minimum of space, light, and air; shall be 
taught by persons having at least some fitness for the 
work of instruction; and that the work of those 
teachers shall be supervised by men or women who 



THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 303 

have made of education a real profession. More- 
over, the laws require communities to maintain 
high schools, and to provide free text-books; they 
compel large towns and cities to establish manual 
training and evening schools; they foster and sub- 
sidize industrial education; and in many other 
directions the state, by statute and by penalties, 
acknowledges the high importance to the commu- 
nity of free public education rightly carried on. But 
the best of it is that public sentiment and public 
generosity are running ahead of the laws themselves, 
so that, to quote from Mr. Martin, writing a num- 
ber of years ago, *' while the compulsory law re- 
quires towns to raise ^3 for each child of school age, 
they voluntarily raise an average of $24.67. While 
they must keep their schools open six months, they 
do voluntarily keep them open eight and a half 
months." 

I have dealt solely with Massachusetts because 
on her sterile hills has been enacted practically 
the whole drama of American educational progress. 
To-day, however, most of the Northern and Western 
States have school laws comparable with those of 
Massachusetts; and many of the states of the rich, 
"hustling" Middle West have gone far beyond her 
in spending money upon education, in making 
schooling free to the very end of the university, in 



304 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

adopting methods of administration, means of 
instruction, and opportunities for the thorough edu- 
cation of teachers far beyond what the old Bay 
State has done. 

Stupendous and far-reaching, however, as was 
the progress of Northern and Western schools in 
the fifty years folio v/ing 1840, that growth estab- 
lished only what one may call the machinery of free 
public education. And like most of our machinery 
at that time, much of this educational mechanism 
was made abroad. Moreover, a great deal of it, 
as has been said, was "made in Germany" by a 
people of a wholly different temperament and 
quality of mind from ours. So, while it was es- 
sential that our American schools should be thus 
organized, while it was inevitable that we should 
copy, more or less closely, the aims and methods of 
German and other foreign schools, it is clear that 
in many ways this alien machinery does not fit our 
needs, does not do and cannot do for us what free 
public education can and should accomplish. As 
the Commissioner of Education said, only a few 
years ago: "The transformation of an illiterate 
population Into one that reads the dally newspaper, 
and perforce thinks on national and International 
interests, is thus far the greatest good accomplished 
by the free public-school system of the United 



THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 305 

States. " But that is not enough for it ultimately 
to do. 

The new education, therefore, instead of turning 
back or looking abroad for guidance, is studying into 
the real purposes and ends of the teaching of to-day 
and here. It is striving to learn the laws of or- 
ganic education: the laws, that is, of mental devel- 
opment, of sense coordination, of psychical interest; 
the laws of physical, mental, and moral health; 
above all, it is endeavoring to find out the social 
needs of the times and to develop types of education 
which shall meet those needs. Upon these, not 
upon custom and prejudice, the new education is 
developing its methods; by these, not by outworn, 
conventional standards, it is measuring its teaching 
results. 

The best modern education aims above all things 
to help the child put himself into harmony with 
eternal law; and it does this by training him in the 
care of his body, in the development and use of his 
senses, in the control of his intellectual and moral 
will. In the light of the new education, we teach 
him, not as a pupil, but as a human being; we use 
as the spur of education, not compulsion, but in- 
terest and sympathy; we strive not to mold the 
child from without, but to develop him from within; 
we spend less time in laying out courses of study, 



3o6 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

we spend more time in creating an educative at- 
mosphere. We are perceiving, in short, that edu- 
cation is a process of evolution different for each 
individual pupil, and that the business of the school 
is to direct and to bring to the highest possible 
point for every child this individual process of 
development. 

So we are beginning to agree, I think, upon the 
following main truths in education: (i) that we 
must educate individuals, not masses; (2) that we 
must educate by sympathy, not by compulsion; 
(3) that we must reckon with and must enlist all 
the social forces — of which the school is but one — 
that are molding the child's life; (4) that we must 
strive for "balance" — that is, for a simultaneous, 
harmonious development of body, mind and soul; 
(5) that we must ever keep in view, as the supreme 
goal of education, the child's social and moral life. 

The corollaries of these main propositions are, 
of course, obvious. If we are to educate individuals, 
not masses, we must have small classes; if we are 
to educate by sympathy, we must have teachers 
trained to understand and to practise this higher 
way of teaching; if we are to take into account all 
the social forces that surround the child, we must 
educate those forces — the family, the community, 
the church — to understand and to perform their 



THE GENESIS OF THESE DEMANDS 307 

share in education; if we are to aim for balance in 
education, we must reform our curricula, must 
enlarge the uses of the schoolhouse, must spend 
three and four and ten times as much upon our 
schools as we to-day provide. If we are to make 
morality the supreme end of education, we must 
ourselves live better lives, we must make our cities 
and our towns more decent places in which to rear 
a child. 

Broadly speaking, then, the conditions essential 
to a real education are: stimulating, healthful, 
moral surroundings for the child everywhere and 
every day; less of politics and meddling, more of 
the true science and art of education in the average 
school; small classes, in which each child may be 
really educated as an individual human being; 
well-educated teachers in every grade, and a strong 
professional spirit in the whole teaching staff; 
genuine and unflagging cooperation on the part of 
the fathers and the mothers; and much more 
generous support from the public to whom the 
public schools belong. To secure these things and 
to build from them the new American education is 
to be the absorbing work of the twentieth century. 
It is a stupendous task to perform; but whether it 
be done or whether it be not done means life or 
death to these United States. And hopeless as it 



3o8 NEW DEMANDS IN EDUCATION 

may now appear, the task will have been accom- 
plished if the end of the twentieth century sees 
education as far ahead of to-day as to-day's best 
standards are in advance of the crude and feeble 
schooling of the first quarter of the nineteenth 
century. 



THE END 



INDEX 



Academies, 203, 296 

Adolescence, 82, 189, 203, 206, 
210, 214 

Agricultural vs. industrial edu- 
cation, 45, 237 

Aimlessness in education, 86, 91, 

94 
Apprenticeship, 45, no, 240 
Aristocratic education, 87 
Arithmetic, 34, loi, 166 
Arts, fine vs. useful, 261 
Average child, 38, 65, 79, 215 
Avocation, necessity for, 276 

Bacon, Francis (quoted), 272, 279 

Ball, John, 237 

Barnard, Henry, 300 

Baron de Hirsch Trade School, 

119 
Boston Trade School, lao 
Bread and butter education, 119 
Browning, Robert (quoted), 256 
Buildings, 22, 24, 40, 57, 164, 301 
Business agent, 63 
Business organization, 54, 56, 59, 

63 

"Captains of Industry," 125 

Carlyle (quoted), 44 

Carter, James G., 300 

Caste system, 115 

Centennial Exposition, 264 

Child-study, 41, 93 

Church education, 30, 45, 224 

Citizenship, 158, 160, 168, 171, 

209 
Citizenship, education for, 12, 31, 

40, 47, 59, 9o,;i22, 157, 164, 169, 

187, 210, 283 



Civic duties, 150, 155, 288 

Collecting mania, 228 

College entrance requirements, 3, 

16, 203, 212 
College graduates, 81 

College influence on education, 
15, 19, 95, "5, 189, 203, 283, 
289 

Concentration, loi, 166, 176 

Conservation of human power, 
6, 107, 124, 198 

Continuation schools, in 

Cooper Union, in 

Coordination, 245, 254 

Correctional institutions, 19 

Correspondence schools, no 

Cost of education, 7 

Courage, true, 155 

Craftsmanship, 238, 250, 255 

Creativeness, 247, 255 

Criminals, manufacturing of, 67 

Ctdture, 87, 122, 130, 251 

Curiosity, 216, 220, 229 

Defectives, 168 
Democracy, 47, 5i» 54 
Development the aim of education, 

17, 163, 188, 210, 283, 306 
Discipline, 13, 172, 178, 184, 194, 

209 
Disease, 21, 79, 167 
District schools, 296 
Drexel Institute, in 

Education, aimlessness in, 86, 91, 

94 
Education, college influence on, 
IS, 19, 95, "5, 189, 203, 283, 
289 



309 



3IO 



INDEX 



Education, cost of, 7 
Education, efficiency in, 7, 17, 

22, 29, 42, 47, 63, 281 
Education for citizenship, 12, 31, 

40, 47, 59, 90, 122, 157, 164, 

169, 187, 210, 283 
Education, free, 26, 70, 143, 302 
Education, health, 18, 42, 47, 50, 

100, 106, 132, 167 
Education, machinery of, 57, 59, 68 
Education vs. instruction, 27, 

29, 42, 6s, 157, 278, 283 
Educational engineers, 20 
Efficiency in education, 7, 17, 22, 

29, 42, 47, 63, 281 
Elective principle, 96, 182, 199 
Engineering, profession of, 72 
English public schools, 86, 298 
Equality, 37 
Erudition, 273 

Evolution, dominance of, 49, 306 
Examination system, 15, 115, 205, 

283 
Experts, 68 

Faculties for schools, 24, 66 

Family, the, 93, 150 

Farm education, 5 

Feeble-mindedness, 43 

Formal discipline, 209 

Free education, 26, 70, 143, 302 

Friends, 137 

"Gang-spirit," 216, 219, 235 

Geography, 34, 166 

German efficiency, 114 

Goal in education, 18, 86, 91, 158, 

306 
Graft, 8, 23 
Grammar, 34 
Gumption, 4, loi, 105, 133, 167 

Habit, 177 

Health education, 18, 42, 47, 50, 

100, 106, 132, 167 
Henry of Prussia, Prince, 125 
High school courses, 3, 94, 103, 

107, 118, 215 



High schools, 186, 191, 202 
History, 34, 166, 208 
History of education, 78, 84 
Home study, 104, 232 
Home training, 5, 30, 45, 194, 227 
Human intercourse, 134, 250, 278, 
286 

Illiteracy in New England, 295 

Irmnigration, 46 

Individuality, 14, 32, 39, 69, 75, , 

80, 84, 92, 97, 189, 197, 216,1 

221, 249, 306 
Industrial training, 18, 24, 109, 

119, 123, 242, 259, 269 
Industries and education, 19, 116 
Inefficiency, 167 
Infant, the 176 
Instruction vs. education, 27, 

29, 42, 6s, 157, 278, 283 

Johnson, Samuel (quoted), 248 
** Journal of Education," 300 

Kindergarten, the, 85 

Labor unions, 122 
Laboratory methods, 247 
Latin grammar, 173 
Law, obedience to, 49 
Law, profession of, 72 
Lincoln, Abraham, 52 
Lowell Free School, in 

Machinery of education, 57, 59, 
68 

Manhattan Trade School, 119 

Mann, Horace, 300, 

Manners, 103 

Manual training, 18, 24, 91, loi, 
106, 109, 116, 166, 245, 2S3, 
257, 267 

Manual training, Russian sys- 
tem of, 266, 

Manufacturing, 238 

Martin, George H. (quoted), 
296, 303 

Mechanical methods, 97, 249, 281 



INDEX 



3" 



Mechanic arts, 238, 266 
Medicine, profession of, 72, 77, 280 
Moral cowardice, 48 
Moral education, 42, 45, 49, 83, 

100, 148, 163, 16S, 215, 223, 231, 

253 

Neighborhood, the, 93 

Nervous strain, 217 

New Education, the, 38, 95, 173, 

180, 305 
New England education, 87, 292 
Normal schools, 23 

Parental responsibility, 27, 194 
Parenthood, education for, 47, 

229 
Parker, Theodore (quoted), 52 
Partnership, social, 55 
Patriotism, 34, 140, i49, 15°, ^55 
Patriots, false, 147, 152 
Personality, 73 
Philosophy, Doctor of, 272 
Physical training, 18, 42, 90, 107, 

^32,, 217 . . , 
Physician, training of, 77, 280 
Pie, effects of, 291 
Politics, 58, 61, 67, 74 
Pratt Institute, iii 
Prevention, education as, 42, 50 

Private education, 28, 297 
Professional education, 99, 12S 
Professional organization, 23, 70 
Professional schools, 86 

Reading, 33, loi, 165 
Religious ecstasy, 216, 222, 230 
Repetition, 177, 180 
Research, 274 
Responsibility, 55) 62 
Revivalism, patriotic, 144 
Roosevelt, Theodore, 127 
Runkle, Dr. John D., 157, 265^ 
Russian system of manual train- 
ing, 116, 266 

Salaries, 10, 22 
Scholarship, American, 279 



School boards, 8, 15, 23, 40, 58, 

61, 68, 104 
School buildings, 22, 40, 57, 165, 

301 
School superintendents, 9, 63 
Scientific thought, influence cf, 

48 
Self-assertion, 216, 219, 229, 233 
Self-control, 31, 35, 138 
Sense training, 18, 91 
Sexual development, 218 
Sickness in schools, 21 
Small classes, 23, 68, 92, 164, 170, 

250, 307 
Social education, 14, 24, 32, 56, 

134, 160, 189, 198, 207, 268, 286, 

306 
Society, influence of, 224 
Spanish War, 60 
Specialists, 41, 271, 276 
State and individual, 140, 151 
State control of education, 11, 302 
Strains of modem life, 44 
Street training, 14, 3o> 225 
Superficiality, 181 
Superintendents, 9, 63 
Swashbucklers, 34, i55 

Taxation, school, 29 

Teachers, competency of, 10, 57, 

65, 92 

Teachers, responsibility of, 40, 

Teachers, training of, 11, 23, 68, 

71, 76, 82, 262, 306 
Teaching profession, 23, 67, 70, 

74, 307 , 
Technical education, 109, in, 124 
Technical knowledge, 99 
Technological education, 109, 266, 

281, 287 
Text-books, 36, 65 
Three R's, 17, 31, Qi, loi, 1^2, 

181, 191 
Thring, Edward, 26 
Town meeting, 45 
Trade education, 46, 109, 118, 241, 

259, 269 



312 



INDEX 



Trade guilds, 239 

Trade unions, 243 

Training of teachers, 11, 23, 68, 

82, 306 
Truancy, 64, 66 

Uniformity, 37, 39, 182 
United States, meaning of, 146 
Uppingham School, 26 

Vocational education, 24, 94, 118 



Walker, F. A. (quoted), 193 
War, evils of, 154 
Washington, Booker T., 85 
Will, training of, 138, 213, 232, 
Williamson School, 112 

253 
Woodward, Prof. C. M., 266 
Writing, 33, loi, 166 

Young Men's Christian Asso- 
ciation, 112 



AUG 15 1912 



d 







\^^'' /^a^^/' 













.V ^ 




%j"^^'^;#' 









V ^ ^ * « A -^ 










r^/A 



v^-e 



^AO^ 







'= 'Vd' .*^lft'= .^^d< 



/°'^o/^:^«!^V' 



.' ^^^■°- 



.<><?^ 



o- 






^ <^ Ci, 






^* oV '^ •%vrri^* <0 ^- 






v 




^\ % .^^ .' 



'-^./ 









.^^ 















■> :! 



%, 









•'= V.# 






; .^ ^- 



^Xi ^ r^ C <^ •>■ 



^^^4 



^'^" -^^c^ 







^* <^ -^ •, 












-\,*^ 






o . -^^ 



:%: 



\> ^ ^ * o 















^^^ 



^AO^ 



'q. 






^^^^- 



V ». 



o. 



